Honorable Mention
Friends of the University Undergraduate Libraries Poetry Prize
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Hymn For Circles
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bite your tongue if it hurts. don’t call yourself a lover; you are no such thing. pleasure pales in comparison to the indulgence of melancholy. stare too long off of bridges, make the walk home lit only by sky reflecting snow. don’t jump, don’t breathe, don’t veer off course. keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, operators not liable for losses. the street lights are still sodium. small victories. takethem when you can. bite your tongue. there is poetry in most things and most of it is not worth the anguish. call yourself a lover. bite your tongue in your cheek. Romance is for the bored. romance is for the boring. conjure up a feeling in your cheaply made gloves. throw yourself down upon the chaise lounge at just the right angle. you’re tired of the classics. rhyme with history anyways. all art is derivative because all pain is derivative. feel a new emotion and divide it by zero. force your lover to analyze your form, function, and role in the narrative. take a body to water and make it drink. a horse walks into a bar. bite your tongue if it hurts..
JUNO HUNTER (they/he) is an actor, poet, creative, and senior Theatre Performance major.
Their work often takes inspiration from
absurdist theatre,
prose poetry,
and that feeling you get when you've been
driving straight for
three miles
and realize
your GPS
is frozen.
It Feels Just Like the Real Thing
Picture me in a dollar store. Picture me dead in a dollar store. Cutting through the smoke and mildew, my body smells of sea salt body wash and sea salt deodorant and sea salt hand soap. Picture a better artist, someone with substance. Picture their body in the next aisle over. There are two dollar bags of silver party hat confetti discarded upon their body. There’s an errant bar of Irish Spring or Dial or Dove or Palmolive or Ivory. Pretzel M&Ms. Canary yellow BIC lighter. Dead body. There’s an Avril Lavigne song playing on the radio. She’s in here, too. Dead. Someone’s taped your mother’s kindergarten turkey hand to the milk fridge. There’s a line of yarn spooling from your chest, severed at the door, and there’s no meaning to any of this except that the Night Air scented candles are now on sale 20 minutes from closing. $1.25. Minus tax. Picture yourself bobbing along to the music in the scented candle aisle. Isn’t that fun? Picture me again, at least for 14 more minutes. Just a few minutes more.