We are excited to announce the following winners of the April 2024 Chattanooga Writers' Guild Monthly Contest: Cynthia Robinson Young with the submission “Dear Younger Self” and runner-up Ken Harpe with the submission “Do You Have the Key?”
Our poetry judge also wishes to commend Chris Wood with the submission “Abandoned to the Interstate.”
Dear Younger Self
--after Gabriella Bates
Grab the keys and go back
when it’s time to return to the house
you grew up in-- Victorian three story,
built to hold extended families
arriving from European lands
under Liberty’s watchful beacon,
a house European Immigrants abandoned
and passed on to your family; your people,
stolen from Cameroon and Nigeria,
migrated from Jim Crow South; all of us, forever
searching for the same thing:
The Promised Land.
Release him--
when the time comes to forgive your father,
his weakness for the freedom that lived in his sax.
His love for the music
that be-bopped him down a road
already potholed with drugs and destruction
leading him
away from the life his mother held
most dear--his;
away from the white TV families
you believed he had the power to replicate,
like happily- ever- afters and fairy dust.
Embrace
the grey dreadlocks
that will fall from your head as
you will inherit everything, good and bad.
A path you’ve now memorized in your soul
will lead you to the same places
your foremothers passed through,
push pins in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, New Jersey.
Sit on the porch.
The one from your childhood, the one
that wrapped itself around the house
you grew up in, the one
that wrapped itself around
you. The one
that always dreams you
home.
.
Cynthia Robinson Young is the author of the chapbook, Reflections of a Feral Mother (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Migration (Finishing Line Press, 2018).
Her work has appeared in journals and magazines including The Writer’s Chronicle, Poetry South, The Cutleaf Reader, Chapter 16, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for 2023. An excerpt from her novel in progress is included in the anthology, Dreams for a Broken World (Essential Dreams Press, 2022). She lives in Chattanooga with her husband, eight adult children, and 18 grandchildren.
“Do You Have the Key?”
It was only a broken key,
Though in the shudder of her call for help,
We, her parents, could not know this …
Language is a key also, the words we channel
Over cell phones, a learned reflex.
Ignition key snapped off
In the parking lot next to Starbucks,
In Hamilton Place City,
Within sight of our cardiologists,
Two blocks from my glaucoma specialist,
Who on first meeting, with the joy of discovery
Said, “you’ve lost 75% of your vision
In your right eye:” my baseball eye,
My golf eye, my M16 eye.
Vision is a key made of light.
Facts are keys:
They turn our lives
One way or another.
It was only a broken Ford Focus ignition key.
But an only daughter’s distress
Stopped time and locked our minds.
Mr. Eliot set too high a bar:
We cannot “extinguish personality.”
Our words speak softer than our actions,
But they still speak as keys unlocking the self.
The chansonnier of Rock and Roll, Carole King,
Wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” and gave it away
To James Taylor, his only Number One.
It is good to know that when you call
Someone who cares will come.
Surprisingly clear traffic in the bright Sun …
A 45 minute drive from Signal Mountain;
Her mother had the spare key.
*T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood. 1920.
*Carole (Klein) King, Tapestry (album). 1971.
.
Ken Harpe: Fulfilling my commitment as an Army officer during Vietnam, and marrying writer, Cary Graham, my goal of becoming an English Professor changed to a successful business career. But throughout, as I've published poetry, fiction, essays, and professional articles, I've led in Christian Wiman's words, "a quiet life in poetry."
Abandoned to the Interstate
Dark clouds hang low
over the hollowed-out building
and Shell gas pumps. Weeds thrive
in the cracks and crevices
of the faded asphalt parking lot.
Concrete posts, flaking yellow,
guard the long-ago gas price
clinging to the fuel station
layered in age and black mold.
The sign, peeling with memories,
looms over the once thriving truck stop.
I can still hear dishes clanging,
jukebox playing East Bound and Down,
and truckers flirting with the waitresses.
.
Chris Wood is a manager by day, spends most evenings cleaning up dog hair from the abundance of love she receives from her fur babies, and in between, she writes to balance her right brain from her left. She has a bachelor’s degree in accounting and works for a REIT. Her work has appeared in several journals and publications, including Black Moon Magazine and Salvation South.
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month.
Go to the Monthly Contest Series Info page to view the genre and theme for each month.
This contest is free to enter for members of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild. To become a member, click HERE.