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Poetry Winners

Eating Strawberries in the Dark

Poetry - Second Place

By Kathleen Hellen | Posted 9/27/2000

(From "Unsettling Things," The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon)

Flats of exuberant season,
a quart or more of sweetened
with cream in a bowl
too big to conceal.
I know what it means:
Eyes bigger than stomach.
Eyes that father desire.
Was it the lesson of waste
He intended? Of want?
There are the table I was told
to sit, forced to eat them all:
some small as my thumb,
some humped, Siamese,
some scratchy as an unshaved chin;
none exactly a heart.
Strawberries until the floor darkened
and I swelled into hives, sick
of myself, my own dumb hunger.

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And the winners are... (12/2/2009)
City Paper's 11th annual Fiction and 10th annual Poetry Contest

An Airline Ticket to Romantic Places (12/2/2009)
First Place

What Was Janie Looking At? (12/2/2009)
Second Place

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Let us go in (10/18/2000)
--for Emily DickinsonA blue line on a wink of sea;a sweet drink; Possibility.

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