Sign up for our newsletters   

Baltimore City Paper home.
Print Email

Poetry Winners

Rigging It

Poetry - First Place

By L. Maynard | Posted 10/20/1999

You go looking for your life.

Determined, you poke your stick

through trash cans and the backs of closets.

Mission-bound, you begin to travel

outside your own neighborhood.

Seems you just turned

your head a minute, or blinked;

it was right there, wasn't it?

Of a piece, the machinery oiled,

the gears synchronized?

Only when you really start

to parse it out, maybe it was always

a nut here, a sprocket there,

broken bits, ill-fitting, needing

wired-together assembly, and then

a good fast jab to get them going.

Related stories

Poetry Winners archives

More Stories

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

More from L. Maynard

The Man With the Collapsible Halo (4/5/2000)
No doubt he got the first one from a cereal box,as a boy:one of those red plastic rings,a poor...

Period of Unemployment (8/11/1999)
The day rolls out before you like an uncracked sidewalk.

Comments powered by Disqus

Calendar

Restaurants