2019 Sublingua Prize for Poetry Finalist Selected by Dorothea Lasky
Snow
Jessica Fischoff
One breath, one final human thing.
Your sickly pallor, seven useless men,
outside the white is not snow, but ash.
They took torches to the forest just
to rid me of what was mine. They cleared
the castle, came for my head, my teeth -
porcelain trophies. One thing unrooted
and the whole room tumbles down. The roof
folds in on itself like skin so aged that bones
only carry the draping. Let me rebirth
the beauty you fought for. Let me lead
the battle. Let me lock you in this garden,
drink from your pools, peel back the petals,
suck sugar from your nectaries. I won’t leave
until I’ve plucked my bouquet, placed you safely
in the coffined vase. I won’t forget
to wake you. I won’t go away hungry.
Your sickly pallor, seven useless men,
outside the white is not snow, but ash.
They took torches to the forest just
to rid me of what was mine. They cleared
the castle, came for my head, my teeth -
porcelain trophies. One thing unrooted
and the whole room tumbles down. The roof
folds in on itself like skin so aged that bones
only carry the draping. Let me rebirth
the beauty you fought for. Let me lead
the battle. Let me lock you in this garden,
drink from your pools, peel back the petals,
suck sugar from your nectaries. I won’t leave
until I’ve plucked my bouquet, placed you safely
in the coffined vase. I won’t forget
to wake you. I won’t go away hungry.
Jessica Fischoff is the Editor and Owner of [PANK], American Poetry Journal, the author of the little book of poems, The Desperate Measure of Undoing (Across the Margin, 2019) and Editor of the upcoming Pittsburgh Anthology (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020). Her thoughts on editing appear in Best American Poetry and The Kenyon Review. Her writing appears in Diode Poetry Journal, The Southampton Review, Prelude, Fjords Review, Creative Nonfiction and Yemassee.
About the work: “'Snow' came from a series I wrote during National Poetry Month. A friend challenged me to write a daily poem about fairy tale and ancient lore-based characters. My pieces seemed to root themselves with a villainesque speaker, and so, in an experimental hybrid moment of adding a touch of vampire to the Snow White tale, the poem came alive.”
About the work: “'Snow' came from a series I wrote during National Poetry Month. A friend challenged me to write a daily poem about fairy tale and ancient lore-based characters. My pieces seemed to root themselves with a villainesque speaker, and so, in an experimental hybrid moment of adding a touch of vampire to the Snow White tale, the poem came alive.”
The Art
Positive/Negative Self-Talk (For Melissa), by K Johnson Bowles, 18 x 18 inches, mixed media collage, 2019
K. Johnson Bowles Giving voice to my experiences has always been a part of my artwork. In 2018, someone threatened to harm me. I’m not interested in illustrating or recreating what happened; I’m more interested in showing how the experience haunts me. During the last few years, I traveled a great deal for work and mostly alone. When I was finished with my work for the day, I visited museums, where I felt safe in strange cities. There, I used my iPhone to photograph details of paintings that expressed my thoughts related to safety and justice. These details are integral to my new body of work, Veronica’s Cloths."
