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Tuesday, August 25, 2020

2019 Birdy Throwback - 2021 contest opens in one week!

A Certain Kind of Forgiveness by Carol Kapaun Ratchenski is the inaugural winner of the Birdy Poetry Prize, selected and published in 2019. This poetry collection offers observations of the way we move through life; observations of the way hips move in different contexts; and other bold claims about the power of language, food, and drink. The four poems that carry the the collection title move through understandings and non-understandings between mothers, daughters, fathers, sons and grandchildren.



A Certain Kind of ForgivenessPart I

There is a certain kind of forgiveness between mothers
and daughters that fathers cannot understand. A certain
kind of blue glass shard. A black cohosh root tea. Honey
withheld. The sour turn of a morning glance over a
chipped cup. Dark roast. Four sisters one room. Two
sisters one bed. Some dreamy grasping, a push into the
closet door at midnight. The hidden whiskey. A shared
secret. Luke warm water, copper healing, burnt throats
and an old story told only between them. A boat, a
shotgun. Unquiet houses of the mid-century middle
classes. Radios turned to baseball and winter weather
warnings. Language of regret, sarcastic and muttered
over the don of a moaning refrigerator, a whistling
teakettle, a crying baby, a swearing father, a sighing
mother. The latter the loudest. All this and still I want to
be exactly like her, as beautiful, as fragile, as soft and
round and powerful.


In one week, the reading period for the third-annual Birdy Poetry Prize contest commences! What will the Meadowlark team be reading next? We hope it’s your manuscript! Submit your full-length poetry manuscript at birdypoetryprize.com

 

 

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