Poem of the Week: Karen Skolfield

Art Project: Earth

Balloon, then papier mâché.

Gray paint, blue and turquoise, green,

a clouded world with fishing line attached

to an old light, original to the house, faux brass

chipping, discolored, an ugly thing. What must

the people of this planet think, the ground

knobby and dry, the oceans blue powder,

the farmland stiff and carefully maintained.

Sometimes they spin one direction,

then back again. How the coyotes howl.

How the people learn to love, regardless.

The majesty of their own towering hearts.

The mountains, which they agree are beautiful.

And the turquoise – never has there been

such a color, breaking into precious

and semi-precious stones. They build houses

from them, grand places of worship,

and there is much to worship. Look up,

for instance. Six suns. The wonder of it.

First one, then the next, eclipsing
the possibility that their world hangs by a thread.

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Used with permission.

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Karen Skolfield’s book Frost in the Low Areas won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry and the First Book Award from Zone 3 Press. She is a 2014 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow and the winner of the 2014 Split This Rock poetry prize. Skolfield is the poetry editor for Amherst Live and an associate editor at Sundress Publications; she teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts.

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Announcing Split This Rock's 2014 Contest Winners!

   

First Place

"At the Mall, There's a Machine That Tells You if You Are Racist"

Karen Skolfield

Karen Skolfield's book Frost in the Low Areas (2013) won the First Book Award for Poetry from Zone 3 Press. She is the poetry editor for Amherst Live, a quarterly production of poetry, politics, and more, and she's a contributing editor at the literary magazines Tupelo Quarterly and Stirring. Her poems have appeared in Best of the Net Anthology, Cave Wall, Memorious, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, West Branch, and others. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts.  

  

Second Place 

"School of the Americas" 

Rebecca Black

 

 

In 2011, Rebecca Black, was a Fulbright distinguished scholar at the Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  She is the author of Cottonlandia, winner of a Juniper Prize. A former Wallace Stegner and NEA fellow, her poems can be found in Poetry, New England Review, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, Agni, and many other magazines.  She has taught at several universities, most recently in the MFA Program at UNC-Greensboro. 

 

Third Place

"My Father's Hands"
Alison Roh Park 

 

Photo by: Yoon Kim

 

Alison Roh Park is a Kundiman fellow, Pushcart nominated poet, and recipient of of the PSA New York Chapbook Fellowship, Poets & Writers Magazine Amy Award and Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She teaches ethnic studies at Hunter College and is founding member of The Good Times Collective of emerging poets writing in the tradition of Lucille Clifton.