Congratulations, you get a chance to enter the first ever Apostrophe Cast Contest. This is going to be fun because there’s a prize.
How Do I Play?
Illustrate Cecily’s poem, “I Lost My Horse.” E-mail your illustration (drawing, photo, found art etc) to choi@apostrophecast.com, putting “Contest” in the subject line of your email. We’ll post our favorites to the blog as they come in so check back and help us decide on the winner.
I Lost My Horse
I was looking for an animal, calf or lamb,
in the wire, metal and hair along the fence line.
Wire, metal and hair and there, in the gully, a man
I was pretending was dead. I pretended
to leave him where the woods met the meadow,
walking fast because I’d left my horse lashed
to a fence I lost track of two valleys
ago. Like a horse, I shied from the dead.
Here, calf. Here, lamb. I listened, wanting
(without my horse, or calf or lamb) to be
whipsmart rather than wanted. I wore orange
on antelope season’s first afternoon
and waited for the click that means the safety is
off. When I spoke, my story was about picking
skulls clean. I wanted everything to be
afraid of me, the horseless girl who wanted
to kill a dead man again. The white bed
with a window behind its headboard became
ice on the meadow road and a tree to stop
a truck dead. I meant to trace my boot steps
back to the fence where things went wrong,
find my horse mouthing the bit, tied up by her
reins. I looked for the horse because she looked
safe enough to love. I looked for the calf
or lamb because there was no calf or lamb
The man left before I could leave him, and I pretended
the world was afraid of me because I was alone.
You can hear Cecily read this poem and others from Field Folly Snow by listening to the current episode of Apostrophe Cast.
How Long Do I Have To Submit?
We’ll take submissions through Thursday, May 8th, and announce the winner soon after.
And, what do I win?
Well, the University of Georgia Press has kindly donated a copy of Cecily Park’s Field Folly Snow for us to give to our winner. Field Folly Snow is one of the volumes in the inaugural VQR Poetry Series.
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