Judge's Comments

“The Me Ran Away From I” makes its demands on the reader but it repays the attention you’re willing to give to it. Its language knits together an unusual and arguably frightening sensibility; it does this knitting piece by piece, it knots synaesthetically, it taxes identity and dares to name whiteness as a quantity. It plays sentence against line and maintains the wavery borders between all persons.

 

-- C.S. Giscombe

 


First Prize

Poetry Radio/Euphemism 1st Annual Poetry Prize

 

The Me Ran Away From I

Josh Fisher

 

I started peeling off my skin the other day
smacked against a brick wall
it splinters into diamonds

 

ripped the last shiny cut off the tip
of my flaccid quiet penis violent

 

with the songs of emancipation
in our shadowed alleyway

 

I shook.  I shook hard.   I fought
narrow four sided shapes off my hot  body

 

and I let them sparkle to the ground to
stare up at me with as shed faces

 

white foreign emigrants that
lay below not mine

 

mimicry exiles that patterned
into a flat corpse on the ground

 

naked shudders wave over my bodies
newly as winter morning cold

 

when orphaned skin fragmented giggles
in the taken shape of I

 

chance at this bare freedom
in the dawn of broken chains

 

myselfs yell for
their body bounding howl to howl

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