We are honored to share with everyone the winners, finalists, and longlist of the 2021 Sappho Prize for Women Poets! This year’s winners were selected by Maggie Smith. Endless gratitude to all who shared their remarkable poems with us—we are better poets for having spent time with your work.
Winners of the 2021 Sappho Prize for Women Poets
1st & $3000— Emily Zogbi for “Lost Things” (to be published on September 7, 2021)
Emily Zogbi is a writer from Long Island and earned her MFA in poetry from The New School. Her work has been published in Rumble Fish Quarterly, Chronogram, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and Empty House Press. She wishes she had been a dancer.
2nd & $300— Sophia Tonnessen for “Layaway“ (to be published on September 8, 2021)
Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen is the author of the upcoming poetry collection Ecologia from Unbound Editions Press.
3rd & $200— Yi Wei for “Look” (to be published on September 9, 2021)
Yi Wei is a first-generation Chinese writer with a BA in Asian American Studies and English from Swarthmore College. She currently serves as the Assistant Flash Fiction Editor at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Yi’s work has been awarded the Lois Morrell Poetry Prize and appeared in Lantern Review and Crosswinds. She’s heading to NYU’s MFA program in poetry this fall, as a Writer in the Public Schools fellow!
Finalists
Lisa Baird for “an alternate universe in which my trauma is made of birds” T. De Los Reyes for “Balloon” donia salem harhoor for “in media res” Grace MacNairfor “Abecedarian for the Man Who Claimed Birth Control Goes Against Nature” Caroline Newfor “How I Became a Mother” Arianne Paynefor “Resurface” Natalie Weefor “In My Next Life as a Fruit Tree”
Longlist
Michelle Peñaloza Rose Solari T. De Los Reyes Janine Certo Lindsay Adkins Becca J. R. Lachman Grace MacNair Kay Lin Sara Baker Alice Templeton Andy Winter ann sim Ellen Romano Gemma Cooper-Novack Allison Thorpe Alyson Favilla Carolyne Wright Duncan Difazio Heather Treseler Laura Plummer Soeun Seo Susan Coronel Beth Yahp Judith Sornberger Alise Versella Carolyn Donnell Dee Dee McNeil Nora Hikari Melanie Almeder Rebecca Byrkit Terry Johnson Tori Sharpe
We are honored to share with everyone the finalists and longlist of the 2021 Sappho Prize for Women Poets! Please join us in congratulating these remarkable poets. Immense gratitude to all who shared stunning poems with us—we are better poets for having spent time with your work. The winners selected by judge Maggie Smith will be announced soon.
Finalists for the 2021 Sappho Prize
Lisa Baird for “an alternate universe in which my trauma is made of birds” T. De Los Reyes for “Balloon” donia salem harhoor for “in media res” Grace MacNairfor “Abecedarian for the Man Who Claimed Birth Control Goes Against Nature” Caroline Newfor “How I Became a Mother” Arianne Paynefor “Resurface” Sophia Tonnessenfor “Layaway” Natalie Weefor “In My Next Life as a Fruit Tree” Yi Weifor “Look” Emily Zogbifor “Lost Things”
Longlist
Michelle Peñaloza Rose Solari T. De Los Reyes Janine Certo Lindsay Adkins Becca J. R. Lachman Grace MacNair Kay Lin Sara Baker Alice Templeton Andy Winter ann sim Ellen Romano Gemma Cooper-Novack Allison Thorpe Alyson Favilla Carolyne Wright Duncan Difazio Heather Treseler Laura Plummer Soeun Seo Susan Coronel Beth Yahp Judith Sornberger Alise Versella Carolyn Donnell Dee Dee McNeil Nora Hikari Melanie Almeder Rebecca Byrkit Terry Johnson Tori Sharpe
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2024 Sappho Prize for Women Poets! Please join us in congratulating these brilliant poets. Deep gratitude to all who shared moving poems with us—we are so lucky to have been immersed in the worlds of your work. The winning poem and runner-ups were selected by guest judge Megan Fernandes and are published on the Palette website.
Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet originally from rural Aotearoa New Zealand. Her book Meat Lovers won Best First International Collection in the UK Poet Laureate’s 2022 Laurel Prize and was a Lambda Literary award finalist. She is head shepherd of the hot-blooded literary journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the Pacific climate poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand. Rebecca is currently topsy-turvy between hemispheres, studying an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan. Her chapbooks Softcore Coldsores and Hardcore Pastorals can be found in the AUP New Poets series and Cordite, with more poems published and forthcoming in places like Salt Hill, Hobart, Glass, and Best New Zealand Poems. Selected words and work can be found at www.rebeccahawkesart.com
JC Andrews is a poet from Springfield, Arkansas with an interest in poems that work as an un-ing, poems that hold questions as a form of caretaking. Most recently, her work can be found in Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, and Salt Hill Journal. She was also the winner of the 2023 Columbia Print Contest and is currently pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Mirande Bissell is a teacher and poet who lives in the Patapsco River Valley, west of Baltimore. Her first book of poems, Stalin at the Opera, won the Ghost Peach Press Prize and was published in 2021.
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2023 Sappho Prize for Women Poets! Please help us congratulate these remarkable poets. Deep gratitude to all who shared poems with us—we are lucky to have been immersed in the worlds of your work. The winning poem and runner-ups were selected by Evie Shockley and will be published in the coming weeks.
Winners of the 2023 Sappho Prize
1st place — Para Vadhahong for “Learning English in the Margins of Masters”
Para Vadhahong hails from Bangkok, Thailand and has lived most recently in Houston, Roanoke, and Southwest Florida. Vadhahong’s poems are published in Kingdoms in the Wild, Hyacinth Review, Lover’s Eye Press, Ice Lolly Review, fifth wheel press, DVAN, Sine Theta, Honey Lit, and more. She earned a B.A. in English and Classics at Hollins University. She is a 2023 Brooklyn Poets fellow, and the winner of Salt Hill Journal’s Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize, the Lex Allen Literary Festival’s Fiction Prize, and Hollins University’s Nancy Thorp Prize. Read more at paravadhahong.weebly.com.
2nd place — Lizabeth Yandel for “Confessional”
Originally from Chicago, Lizabeth Yandel is a writer, filmmaker, and musician based out of rural Oregon. She received her poetry MFA from UC Irvine and was awarded the 2022 University of California Graduate Prize for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, Nashville Review, and The 2020 “Best of” Los Angeles Review. Her first screenplay was chosen as a semifinalist in the highly regarded Blue Cat Screenwriting Competition of 2022.
3rd place — Starr Davis for “COUNTERPETITIONER’S SUPPORTING AFFIDAVIT”
Starr Davis is a poet and essayist whose work has been featured in multiple literary venues such as The Kenyon Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, and Catapult. She is a 2021–2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow and the Creative Nonfiction Editor for TriQuarterly, and the Mama’s Writing Columnist for Raising Mothers. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York and a BA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Akron. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry and creative nonfiction, Best of the Net, and Best American Essays. She works as a poetry mentor and workshop facilitator for Brooklyn Poets.
Finalists
Jasmine Smith Amanda Hodes Chelsea DesAutels Ariana Calderón Teja Dupree Noʻu Revilla M. Cynthia Cheung
Longlist
Amy Dryansky Tianna Bratcher Tamara Panici Brittany Rogers Laura Apol C. R. Glasgow Susan Coronel Anna Konradi Nicole Lachat Gauri Awasthi C. Elliot Mullins Leila Sinclair Clara Collins Peggy Ann Tartt Linnett Heald Morgan Elklund Tamara Panici Jenna Lanzaro Noemi Dean Helena Fagan Suzanne Edison Sara Elkamel Leslie Minot Maria Pappajohn
We are delighted to share the winners, finalists, and longlist for the 2022 Sappho Prize for Women Poets! Please help us congratulate these brilliant poets. Deep gratitude to all who shared moving poems with us—we are so lucky to have been immersed in the worlds of your work. The winning poems were selected by Jos Charles and will be published in a few weeks.
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi who writes about queerness, loss, diaspora, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. Her second collection, Might Kindred, won the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, and is forthcoming in November 2022 from University of Nebraska Press. She is also the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). She has been a nominee for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, and a graduate of the Tin House Winter Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Waxwing, Black Warrior Review, Adroit Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and other publications. Read more at www.monicagomerywriting.com.
Jennifer Harrison has published eight poetry collections. Her ninth, Sideshow History, will be published this year by Black Pepper, Melbourne. She was awarded the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained contribution to Australian poetry. Jennifer is currently Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry.
Kendall Grady is a PhD candidate and instructor at UC Santa Cruz, where they write toward a media theory of love and through sensory ethonographies of poetic couplet. Grady’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PubLab, The Atlas Review, Concrete Flux, Dusie, and Jupiter 88, and have sounded at the Baltic Writing Residency (Stockholm) and the Poetic Research Bureau (Los Angeles). Their chapbook, 321 Couplets, is forthcoming from CoastNOCoast. Grady lives in California with the Midwest in their heart.
Finalists
Hajjar Baban Mansi Dahal Laurel Faye Liberty Ferda Danielle Jones Shelby Pinkham Billie Tadros
Longlist
Claressinka Anderson Sarah Bitter Jennifer Blackledge Talia Bloch Bunny Boisvert Ambriel Bostic Kizziah Burton Abigail Byrd Claire Collison Melissa Crowe Brooke Dwojak Lehmann Majda Gama Kristyn Garza Rochelle Hurt Tyler Hurula Skye Jackson Emma Jaques Perla Kantarjian Aiyana Masla Ngwatilo Mawiyoo Carling McManus Livia Meneghin Sara Moore Wagner Abby Murray Mary Pacifico Curtis Alexandria Peterson Louhi Pohjola Jennifer Pratt-Walter Kait Quinn Khalisa Rae Dipanjali Roy Sonya Schneider Lauren Sheerman Niki Strange Mandy Tu Madeline Augusta Turner Milla van der Have Terry Wright Ellen Zhang
The Winners and Finalists of the 2020 Sappho Prize!
We are honored to share with everyone the winners, finalists, and longlist of the 2020 Sappho Prize, selected by Victoria Chang!
A big thank you to all the women who made this such a tough decision this year. So honored to lift you up and to read your work.
Winners of the 2020 Sappho
1st — Faylita Hicks, for “I Tried Dating Again” (to be published on October 28, 2020)
“‘I Tried Dating Again’ is fierce and beautiful at the same time. The poem deploys gorgeous imagery and caesuras to manage rhythms. Energy and beauty are two words that keep entering my mind while reading Faylita Hicks.” — Victoria Chang
Faylita Hicks’s debut collection, HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), has been named a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry and the Julie Suk Award. They are the Editor-in-Chief of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and their work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Longreads, The Rumpus, the Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Huffington Post, Slate, Cincinnati Review, and others. They have been offered fellowships and residencies from Tin House, Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts, and the Right of Return USA program for previously incarcerated artists. They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University and are working on a second poetry collection and multi-media project entitled ARCO while living in San Marcos, TX.
2nd — Yvette Siegert, for “Papier-mâché” (to be published on October 21, 2020)
“I love the use of line here by Yvette Sigert—how the pacing of the poem is controlled via the line and the phrase, alternating between the short and long phrase or sentence within the larger capsule of the long line. Beautifully rendered poem.” — Victoria Chang
Yvette Siegert is a CantoMundo Poetry Fellow and winner of the 2019 Oxford/Lord Alfred Douglas Poetry Prize, and her critically-acclaimed translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s late poetry, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 (New Directions), won the 2017 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma, Boston Review, The White Review, The Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Aufgabe, North American Review, 6×6, Guernica, St Petersburg Review, Berlin Quarterly, Oxford Review of Books, The Scores, and the Broken Sleep Anthology of Immigrant Writing (2021). She is currently a doctoral candidate in Latin American literature at Merton College, University of Oxford.
3rd — Natasha Rao, for “Abecedarian on Shame” (to be published on October 14th, 2020)
“I admire the form of this poem, as I find Abecedarians hard to write. Natasha Rao’s work deftly uses the form in a natural and organic way, shifting between imagery and narrative. The final image of the zinnia is stunning.” — Victoria Chang
Natasha Rao holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Natasha has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Offing, Rattle, The Margins, and Narrative. She is currently the deputy editor of American Chordata and lives in Brooklyn.
The Finalists
féi hernandez, for “Coming Out or Undone.” Marianne Chan, for “WATCHING A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT IMELDA MARCOS, I THINK ABOUT THE BOTTOMS OF MY COUSIN’S FEET.” Christell Victoria Roach, for “Quartering” Rozanne Gold, for “Kitchen Work” Itiola Jones, for “Vanity” Ann-Marie Blanchard, for “Inside Me Are Icebergs That Make It Hard to Dance” Margot Douaihy, for “Don’t”
The Longlist
Rebecca Aronson
Christina Lloyd
Jennifer Dorner
Mary Jo Thompson
Ariel Machell
Khalisa Rae
monica yoshida
Elizabeth Aoki
Bethany Schultz Hurst
Dana Krugle
Rebecca Loggia
Kizziah Burton
Jessie Li
Daimys Ester García
Katrina Roberts
Yvette Siegert
Jennifer Davis Michael
Elana Osen
Ruth Wiggins
Madeleine Wattenberg
Mariana Goycoechea
Lupita Eyde-Tucker
Shellie Harwood
Ann-Marie Blanchard
Candice Iloh
Alyssa Trifone
Abigail Welch
Clio Hamilton
Gail Langstroth
Ameera Pearsall
Monica Prince
Carolina Hotchandani
Kizziah Burton
Chivas Sandage
Elise Hernandez
Esther Ra
Carolina Hotchandani
Beth Williams
Dion O’Reilly
Eliza Wood
“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 looselet 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.
