She
Nothing about her is appropriate. Decades older with
the style of a child. Patches of pink hair, interspersed
with bleached and blue bits. And dozens of sparkly
plastic beads hanging to her waist. Her dress yellow,
a split up the side, where I can just make out
the tips of grey wool leg warmers. And the morning
Mediterranean sun sticky, sweating. Minutes later
we stand in a circle in the room that has become
my womb. My shrine, my solitary space surrounded
by the sea. Where I chisel myself back together. Today
the teacher invites us to go inside our bones.
What does it mean to go in the bones? She breaks
the silence with the voice of my childhood—
cigarettes and six packs and airless trailers
with barking dogs, but she is not from Appalachia.
She is desert-born with a wildness in her eyes. I
want her eyes. She flaps her arms. Slides with
her leg warmers, slipped over pink-toe-nailed feet,
across the circle we keep. She knows no boundaries.
Sings into the silence. Stares. As if she knows what
I want to know.
AUTHOR BIO
Tara Zafft has a BA from UCSD and Ph.D. in Russian literature from the University of Bath, UK. She has poems published in Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice, Write-Haus, Aether Avenue Press, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal, and Dumbo Press.
JUDGE'S REMARKS
“She” is a poem of the body, a poem of womanness, a poem of going inside one’s bones. The speaker surprises us and dazzles us with imagery of adornment, of place. We move from the Mediterranean Sea to the airless trailers of Appalachia to the classroom where “She knows no boundaries.” This year’s contest winner, “She” is the kind of poem you return to again and again, traversing the speaker’s geography with curiosity as the words on the page “sing into the silence.”
POETRY JUDGE
Allison Field Bell
Allison Field Bell is a multi-genre writer originally from northern California, but currently living in Utah.
