“Look” by Yi Wei is the 3rd place winner for the 2021 Sappho Prize, selected by guest judge Maggie Smith.

“I admire the way this poem explores multiple iterations of experience—like turning something in one’s hands, looking carefully at its many facets. There is comfort in this line: “In every version of this story, I am alive.” But no, wait, that comfort is rescinded here: “In every version of the story but this one, I am alive.” I finished this poem and wanted to read more by this writer.” —Maggie Smith

Look

1. 

I am walking down the street and no one wants to kill me. I am walking down the street and no one kills me. In the grocery store, the first melon I pat is ripe. The security guard is white and nothing else. In the building, there is less room for being turned on and no room for grief. My fingers are spindly against the door. I am anon. The guard does not nod. The guard cannot linger. The camera does not pick up the guard and the couches and the visitors and the top of my head with it, does not document the last living video of me entering before I am found. The camera does not fling my body across the room like I am meant to float the way ghosts do. I walk. I walk into my apartment and think I am alive. At home, I unpack my melon and what I eat goes into my mouth and I eat it with my mouth like a sermon. The rind of the melon does not fall to the ground. I am alive. In every version of this story, I am alive. The melon is rotten. I am alive. The security guard does a jig as I enter. I am alive. The couch is being dry cleaned. I am alive. I hug the bellhop. I am alive. I smash ten melons against the glass coffee tables. I am alive. The walls of the apartment melt into the bedsheets. I am alive. I am alive. In fifty years, the security guard is in the same bar as me and we do not make eye contact. In every version of the story but this one, I am alive. I think I would like to join the others. I think I would like to have another melon. Give me another melon. Let me swallow it whole. 

2. 

Sweet melon, husk. The women 
in my family are wildly heaving 
what they carry. The seeds still flower 
in their chests, and I wonder how sharp 
the ends, the rot from within. 

My aunt, too ripe and burning. Like her father, 
she plucks the rot from the body, tells my mother 
the news when it spreads. I spoon half a grapefruit
with the news. We are always cutting 
what we cannot save. 

It’s not the ripeness of the melon that is urgent—
to eat, to eat now. There is a nectarine I bought 
on the first warm day, one month ago. It is soft 
and ready and brown. My friend tells me 
about a frozen turkey left on top of her freezer, 

decomposed over a year. It lay there, spread 
too thin, too ripe. Four years late my grandfather 
tells us about his liver. One year late my aunt 
tells us about her breasts. We are always 
the last to the table.

The ripening of our women is a legacy 
of burning. We leave behind nothing
but seeds. My aunt, a sweet life, a sweet 
son. She sleeps alone,
soft and ready and saved. 

3. 

Look at me with your melon ball eyes. Beady 
round things       look                    me in                              the eye deep 
scoop me out       with your melon               ball eyes. Scoop 
the meat with                          the handle                 tug 
me             loose                                        let me fill

4. 

I nightmare again tonight about the Chinese women 
who tuck my hair between my fingers and pull. 
Faceless women who become angry women who 
become dead women who are left in the sheets
when I wake. I am always left in the wake, 
smelling their perfume and unstuck in their sweat, 

my fists clench their hands as I walk 
slowly. Slower, still. I comfort 
them with my knowing—one of us 
is dead and the other lives in the dead 
lands, in the knowing that we are not 
supposed to go soft, and do. 

When my women are mistaken for spoil 
by soldiers, by you, I comfort them. 
After all, what is comfort but two women 
holding hands? Who are we but two soft things 
made softer by embrace—defiant and ripe
in our clasping. So chase us. Look.

“Layaway” by Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen is the 2nd place winner for the 2021 Sappho Prize, selected by guest judge Maggie Smith.

“This poem looks a little wild, a little unwieldy, unspooling down the pages—and this feels  just right to me formally because what it’s sharing with us resists containment and tidiness. In this sense, the poem is embodying, enacting—with humor and vulnerability and pain, which coexist together here. I loved the ending and yet was sorry to see the poem end.”  —Maggie Smith

Layaway

after Galina Rymbu

Lie down on the floor of your bathroom,
if you can.          Remember the last time you were too sick
to go to school – I’ll be remembering the same thing
at the same time, half-jokingly eulogizing myself
when I only had the flu.          How alien the tiles were against your face.
Remember the uncomfortable cold and smooth hard surface–
like the war stories of our grandfathers, lacking names,
details, context – polished stones – or better yet,
like beachglass shorn enough of edges for taking home
and putting in a jar –             what was normally soft and friendly
when sick seems unbearable, your blankets,
the bed itself, heat, your body’s own softnesses a sickening pillow.

“Now that we’re in this alien place,
I’m ready to tell you:                 I’m going to do it.
But you don’t deserve this poem yet.

I’ll ask how much it’ll cost, whether insurance covers it,
if I need to put my new pussy on layaway.
What if I can only afford the econi–pussy,
no cupholders, leather interior, or rims – think I’ll be happy then?
The Spirit airlines of pussies, the Kmart pussy, a lemon,
secondhand, even, if that’s an option, Zipper, Velcro.
This is why we’re on the floor of the bathroom:
I get dizzy thinking about surgery.
Consults, forms, cleanses, recoveries; bloody, boring, long and dull –
in case I forget how to piss, or never learn again,
or if I bleed all over after the surgery,
if I get soaked from the ludicrous joy of impossibility made real.

It’s funny how your brain keeps things from you.
Like how much I hated my body as a teenager,
I kept that feeling in a pit in the middle of a snowy plain.
Fear that no one who knew would touch me –
that one I spirited away on a warm wind over New York in August,
thick with the odors of trash, human sweat, and exhaust to hide under.
Little knowledge that this is, I’ve kept here on the bathroom floor,
ignoring it as best I could.
This is where I lay when I realized that this was not the only world,
and that someone moved on the other side, and where I knew
that my will could shape my breasts, that in me lay
_______well, this,
which has as many arms
and lives in as deep a darkness as the giant squid,
blind and milky, alongside my eely fears and reptilian anxieties.
They’re laying with us on the bathroom floor.
I suppose it could be the floor of the operating theater.
Maybe it’s already happened – after all, this poem will exist before and after,
long after the fears have stopped their desperate
breathy flopping on the cold tile
and after the anxieties have skittered away through crevices
to their own little world of plumbing and mayflies.

In a few decades of our little rest,
pussy now intact, recovered, and fully integrated into human society,
the floor of the bathroom
will sprout. Ivy first and creepers, thin weeds between
the floor’s grout, and out of me, too, will come
Kazakh tulips, calla lily and violets –
out of the brutal words and the holes they tore in me
vaginoplasty     clitoroplasty       labiaplasty
like bulldozers                 TNT                    scalpels
________________________________who could recover?

It doesn’t matter either way if I can piss
but whether I can explain it to the curious,
the passersby who come intrigued to the floor of the bathroom
and ask if I am a boy or a girl
if I am here to intrude on women’s spaces
and undo the hard work of feminists
if I am here to win at sports
I won’t speak. My throat rough with ferns and spores.
The gaps in my memory and constant revisions,
the clear evidence of blows should be enough
for them to gather conclusions among the wild onions.
So come ask me your questions:
I admit I didn’t bring you here to watch me decay into vegetation
or listen to my bad jokes
(though I do love a captive audience) – it is lonely here
in the way I imagine places without life at all are lonely –
the surface of Mars.
the Moon’s ridges.                 I’ve only come here myself
so recently. I still have all the lousy tourist brochures
advertising Being Myself At Last!         clinging to them
like I’d ever buy into them, head to the tourist attractions
of cheap feminism and corporate pride.

If I can’t afford it,
I’ll put it on layaway, get an accountant just so I can say
these are my monthly pussy payments
ask regularly if my pussy will get repossessed.
Did I have the audacity to think a quarter century of profound confusion
would buy me some relief? What the hospital needs is cold hard cash,
iron and diamonds dug from mountains, paid in clotted blood
and blackened lung – the doctors need me to represent the community,
to write a dozen letters in confirmation
I am devout in my delusions                  (I am zealous
and filled with doubt);
the insurance company will take Mexican pesos and gold.
Perhaps I can store some inside me for later use:
I am unsure of how these “pussy” things work.
Is it an instrument on which
one does not play music of any kind
(how indecorous to suggest!)
or a storage container for one’s resentment
or a compartment for vital documents –
bank records, birth certificates and the like?
Mine can be more abstract –
Avoid the gates entirely and find
a surgeon outside the mainstream, on the cheap,
to make a Monet pussy which only looks good from the middle distance
or a Dali pussy                  (microwaved too long).

See, the floor of the bathroom is a great place for thinking.
I’m definitely not down here because I don’t have the energy to get up,
or because I’m ashamed of how much I want it.
My pussy will be covered by insurance
because, fun fact, it is a medical necessity
so maybe it is for the taking of medicine
or a basic function, like breathing,
but how could I be so shallow,
I am an aesthetic, mastered those base and fallow
desires, left them salted in their fields,
blocked them on social media,
all signs of this fever which follows me
like a cloud of bees I cannot get rid of:                   I am also the bees.
The willow, too, especially her weeping.
I have been searching for the right discomfort for so long
to turn myself around and force me to lie still –
a little peace buried now so deeply under moss
lichens                              the rush of clear water –
coming, I think, from me? –
that you can’t see me there at all,
nor I, any longer, see you.

“Lost Things” by Emily Zogbi is the winning poem for the 2021 Sappho Prize, selected by guest judge Maggie Smith. We’re honored to share this stunning poem as well as an interview with Emily about her work.

“On one hand, this poem is grounded by conversational diction and the stuff of a life: keys, statues, portraits, furniture. On the other hand, it’s deliciously elliptical, dreamlike, and fragmented. The tension is electric, especially in the poet’s masterful play with syntax, repetition, and questions that are not questions at all, but framed as statement. This poem will stick with me for a good, long time.”  —Maggie Smith

Lost Things

She  gingerly  adjusts  the   statue of  Jesus
playing    football,   a    stuffed    jackalope,             
a model  of  Apollo  11. A  portrait  of  her
grandfather   rests   against  the   wall.  His
name  is   on   the  moon,   you  know.   We
collect    the    Christmas    dishes   &    haul
them  upstairs.  This  house is  fit to  burst.
What  a  lonely  cloud  I am   she  thinks.  Her
children plead—there are too many things
here. Too many stairs, dollhouses, &  piles
of  ash.  Everyone  recalls  the smell  of  the
electrical fire,  rabbit  & cat huddled  under
the  kitchen  table.    Okay    everyone,   let’s
play   Find   the  Percocet.   Saint    Anthony
laughs at the top of the stairs. It’s  always  a
game  with him. I  turn  over a vase  &  find
my name. I round a corner & the  table  has
vanished.  I  shake  a  teapot  &  the  missing
rings  appear  in  my  mouth.  Where’d  you
find   this.   Someone    is   weeping     by   the
mailbox.  I am  cleaning  in  a manic   frenzy
&   now   the    keys   are    gone.     We’ve   all
misplaced  the  boiling  water.  It’s    melting
the polyester  in an  eldest  daughter’s  shirt. 
I forget  how to peel a tomato. I forget how
to    clean    chicken.   I   don’t    know   when             
I  turned  the   oven  on.  Who   is   that  man
in  the  portrait.   What’s   that   smell.  What
do  you  mean  he’s   dead.   Do   you see that
cardinal  in  the   window.   Do  you   see  the
cloud  in  the  den.  I think  I know  its name.
There’s  a   hole  in  the  fence.   You   wished
yourself   to   the    moon     &   that’s    where
you slipped through.

Interview with Emily Zogbi

by AT Hincapie 

AH: Whether after the loss of a loved one or even to move into a new home, cleaning out a house is often done, as your poem describes, “in a manic frenzy…” Yet in the middle of this chaos, there is time to peel a tomato and clean chicken. How might the rituals of food provide the time and space for meditative reflection that the speaker needs?

EZ: Well, my first thought is that there’s always time for dinner. The house that inspired this poem, my grandparents’ house, was always full of people and often the epicenter of large family gatherings. A lot of my memories take place in that house, with people crowded in the kitchen or around a table full of food, which at times could be chaotic, but comforting at the same time. And, amidst the chaos, there is always something to eat. The lines “I forget how to peel a tomato / I forget how to clean chicken” are a way to indicate that the speaker has forgotten something that should be second nature; the speaker has forgotten a ritual. Food is something that’s supposed to be meditative and grounding, especially in a bustling, active space—so when those rituals are forgotten, the speaker becomes untethered. Ultimately, this is a poem about a house and the people inside of it, but it’s also about memory. I wasn’t trying to capture the specific type of chaos that comes with death or moving, but the frenzy of losing things in general. Both the everyday chaos of this specific house and the general chaos that comes with someone slowly losing their memory. 

AH: Formally, the shape of the poem reinforces a feeling of claustrophobia that is reflected throughout each room of this house. Why is it important for you to show the collections of a person’s life in this way, rather than beginning the poem perhaps outside “weeping by the mailbox” where there might be more open space?

EZ: I think claustrophobic is a good word to describe what’s happening here. This poem had many different forms before I settled on this one; I fiddled around with the shape for a long time, but it always came back to a box. As someone who collects things, I have boxes full of sentimental papers, jars full of shells, tchotchkes galore, etc. I figured for a poem like this, with all the items listed, it made sense to have it all collected in one place. And, I guess, because the poem can become “frenzied” at times, I wanted a form that could contain it. I tried a lot of different shapes—at one point, the poem was like 10 or so box-like stanzas scattered about the page, but that got confusing very quickly. This singular box structure was the only shape that really made sense to me. 

Everything begins and ends with the house, and a house is a collection of a person’s life. The poem is in part about a house, the people inside of it, and what we collect over the course of a lifetime; but ultimately, it’s about the fragile nature of memory, and how maybe we attach memory/meaning to objects so they have a tangible place to live in the world. Without meaning, it’s just stuff. My response to that, after having to think about it, is that you can attach meaning to objects, yes, but you cannot keep memory in a box. Once you lose it, it’s gone. And sometimes a house can be too full. Sometimes a house that, for decades, was the keeper of so many treasures can begin to betray the people it once protected. And I think the house in the poem became so crowded because the people living in it were afraid of what they would forget. 

My grandparents are right now in the process of moving out of a place they’ve called home for nearly 60 years. They raised six children in that house. It’s seen and held a lot of love, drama, fights, and laughter. Over the course of their life, my grandparents have collected a lot of stuff. Like, a lot of stuff. Like ten dumpsters worth of stuff. It was definitely easy to get lost inside of it. The house served all of us well for the time that we had it—I know it as well as my childhood home—and I know it broke their hearts to have to leave. I remember telling my grandmother at one point that a house is just a house. It’s a box that holds our shirts and pants, not our memories. We do that. But I know that sentiment must scare her as her memory becomes more and more unreliable.

So, to answer your question, finally—this is an interior poem. There might be open space by the mailbox, but the speaker eventually must walk back up the driveway and go inside. After all, it’s not the speaker that slips through the fence at the end, but someone else. 

AH: Religious imagery remains a constant presence throughout the house, from the statue of Jesus playing football to the patron saint of lost things laughing at the top of the stairs. Given the unusual appearance of these figures and their juxtaposition with images of space travel, is it possible that the family’s faith has been shaken by their experience? 

EZ: That is entirely possible. I think faith can be easily shaken, but not so easily toppled. All the items that appear in the poem were actual things in my grandparents’ house, including the statue of Saint Anthony at the top of the stairs. It’s big too—comes right up to my knee if I remember correctly. It’s common in some Catholic families to pray to saints, and in my family, since we’re always losing stuff, be it wedding rings or sunglasses, we pray to Saint Anthony. We are a forgetful people! And sometimes after you’ve spent an hour tearing the house apart looking for your car keys only to find them in a place you looked a million times—or in a place that you never would have thought to look, like an old teapot—it does start to feel like someone is playing a sick game with you. It’s not completely about “belief” or “faith,” either; at some point it just becomes part of a family’s vocabulary. I dunno, it just made sense to include him in this poem. An experience like this is frustrating for both the family and the person that it’s happening too, and frustration can lead to doubt. But, yeah, maybe the family’s faith has been shaken, but the speaker’s faith hasn’t. 

AH: In a similar light, this poem often emphasizes shared trauma and collective memory, whether gathering family heirlooms or recalling the smell of an electrical fire. How might the presence of family and friends help to comfort or encourage where perhaps faith and science might fall short for the speaker?

EZ: So, the poem starts in the third person, right—there’s a “she” that by the end of the poem becomes an “I.” I wanted the “who” of the speaker to be sort of blurry, because as you lose your memory, you’re also not sure who is speaking, or who said what. I like that you point out the moon stuff as scientific vs. the religious imagery. I didn’t even think about that. For me the moon is a sort of mythical figure—not like, “the moon landing was fake” mythical, but in the sense that, it’s part of our family mythos. My grandfather actually worked on Apollo 11—he wrote the flight manuals—and everyone who worked on it signed their name somewhere on the spacecraft—I think it was the bottom panel, but I can’t remember—so his name is, in fact, on the moon. So, in the house, the religious iconography and these more “scientific” items are sitting on the same shelf, literally and figuratively. I think, even without the memory theme, family and friends, faith and science, all of that blends together anyway. It’s complicated—the speaker feels misunderstood by her family (she is a “lonely cloud”) and her children worry that there are too many things in the house, which there are, but how can she part with them? Especially if they are the only things keeping her tethered to the Earth.