Search All Winners

Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day

is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,

panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,

ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red

hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it

before him like judgment, saying to the mist,

then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what

I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.

Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.

Snake dreams uncoil,

                        burrow into the spine of books.

Night spills from cracked eggs.

Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.

We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.

ALEX: I get panic attacks over nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ll be at work, or at home, or at school, and suddenly I’ll start shaking and I won’t be able to breathe.

          (pause)

School counselor says that it might be a chemical imbalance. Or, she says, it might have something to do with my past. I think it has something to do with my past, so if you’re my father, it’s probably your fault.

At my desk, with my pen, pencil, markers, ruler, and thick white paper, I was in command. And when I drew the superhero who was my alter-ego, I gave him—i.e., myself—what in all my shyness I didn’t have: a girlfriend. She was as pretty as my limited skills could make her. Her name was Laura.

When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.

We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.