Winner
Cook, Hammond, Logan Writing Prize
​​
​
Wrist-Remnants
​​
Nine tied watchers,
And lines of teeth.
Lined-up eyes that never sleep
​
Hold your wrist so.
Secret-keepers would know it all,
But no ears hear silence fall.
​
Still, no choice in what you disclose.
Unsmelling with no nose,
Can never choose to abstain.
Close yet still so inhumane;
Window watcher,
observers of mundane.
​
Nine tied watchers, never more
Brittle bones keep the score.
Nine tied watchers
And lines of teeth -
Lined-up eyes that never weep.
​​
EMILY OLEARCZYK is an artist, working primarily as a printmaker with poetry as an extension of that work. She is based in Buffalo, NY and graduates from UB this spring. | instagram: @ekato162
Cento for a Wanderer
​
Green-eyed boy in the powder-blue
(afraid-to-forget-the-smell-of-you)
Tree whose leaves were
Postcards
​
definite for a long road.
Seldom seen, and never heard,
like rotting citrus.
Blue child trying
to push me out to sea.
​​
​
Once in a while when
I'm not at sea,
a faint sweetness
like grass.
​​
​
He looks like he –
He works with the
Art of scraping, the empty spaces:
doing all the talking, while I stare at my shoes.
​​
Sources:
Richard Siken / Animal Collective / Ursula Le Guin / Dominic Fike / Jai Paul / Red Hot Chili Peppers / Silas Denver Melvin / Orville Peck / Cameron Winter / Annie Proulx / Ethel Cain / Hozier / Marlon Williams /Richard Siken
Failed-Memory: Narceus Americanus
​
Pairs of limbs
sending us up the hill
Back when you were
boyish,
of angles and gracefulness.
​​
​
There we found, hidden
in the color of asphalt and gravel
Languid lines of legs, metal-ringed –
Many many legs! What a wonder!
multitudes in something so small.
Feet in undulating waves.
If I stare too long I feel
footsteps trickling down my arms.
Armor sectioned out to each marching pair,
ancient but an exoskeleton too fragile.
Who could’ve thought
it would’ve ended so,
feet and rubber to
pestle and mortar on the road.
Endangering themselves for slices of sun:
A price paid for exploration and
​​
​
a plight that needs a savior.
​​
​
You're all action:
A sure shot; speeding
with brakes leaf-thin
and crumbling in the wind.
I won’t touch bugs,
even when it offers kindness.
I'll learn their lesson for them. But you,
​​
​
Y ou grab it.
There in your hands it
curls and curves
round and around,4
just a worried spiral.