This spring, UC Santa Barbara’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted an annual contest to highlight creative student voices across the campus. The following are winning submissions in the Poetry category.
1ST PLACE WINNER
A Creature Void of Form
by Benjamin Epstein
Benjamin Epstein
Second-Year Writing & Literature Major
It’s only radiowaves and bruised knuckles
Collected over a lifetime
As a child, I lived the life of a mercenary
And tin cans carried me across oceans and through gutters
As I explored the world in a model Mayflower
In days stuffed with dead lighthouses
I stored every signal and bruise in a plastic shopping bag
On the cliffs along the coast of California, I met my best friend
A river with no name, no longer than my finger
And we danced beneath the speckled sky
And we tasted the apples that grow
On the tree at the edge of the world
And laughed until the armies of vultures disassembled every star
And I never saw him again
And I sailed into the wall of static
And made it out with my head attached
And my hands were filled with the scissors and glue
Needed to piece the world back together
But tongues of time stole them when I got lost
In a penny arcade by the boardwalk
I was left with fingers too heavy to move
And I retired to my childhood bedroom freckled by wax stars
Thinking that I might find the supplies in my sleep
And nestled in the arms of the bedsheets
I could not see the dragons
Who painted over every wax star on the ceiling
And when I woke up, I found I lost my mouth
So I weaved a tapestry out of words like “uh” and “yeah”
And at the Order of Elks
The party of old men hung it from the antlers on the wall
And it shrank into a sticky note on the bathroom mirror
So I moved to a world populated
By the cold winds that tumble and somersault through abandoned shopping malls
And Halloween flooded Petaluma Accelerated Charter School
Where I was dressed up as Bob Dylan
And I could not here what the teacher was babbling on about
As I got out a dog-eared encyclopedia
And erased every asterisk
It was only radiowaves and bruised knuckles
Collected over a lifetime
2ND PLACE WINNER
Vital Chains
by Margaret Gray
Margaret Gray
Third-Year Religious Studies and Writing & Literature Major
He looks at my body, notices
where my shoulders meet
my torso, considers
how I might be held together,
how blood might go from my heart
to fingers. Walking upon the strand,
the shore unfolding,
pushing far from first
the lights at the wilderness center,
then the stars, where gods,
perfected by their vital chains,
sigh, turn, cast hands this way.
Humming with the fractal
of the coast repeating,
smaller with each foot step,
I picture golden joints, Mars and Jupiter
afloat, ageless skin bound
to marble organs.
Also the net,
a metal so delicate
it challenges movement.
Who is to say
I am held up
by a coarser weave?
Who is to say
there is a time
beyond me?
3RD PLACE WINNER
The Fisherman and the Syren, 1858
by Freddie Baseman
Freddie Baseman
First-Year Writing & Literature Major
Goethe to Leighton
She goeth forth in
tight gold ribbons—
sleek, frothy / she has
her pigeon-child
in her calloused maw.
Syren sixteenths
hooked into sun-tanned
leathery bone / a cliché:
beautiful but deadly.
But the mother syren
ate the worm of phantasy
hawk-faced and bald
with salt-crusted blue
feathery tits.
Drink your draft
down, darling, snuff out
the glow of creation
the pimpling of girlhood.
This is what it feels like:
to stew like peaches—
to age is to dissociate.
air violates the body,
bloody stanzas published
without consent.
This pearled, lacy convict
shuns and spurns / she is
of the sea, she is chained there.
A feminine affliction sports
stars where the welts should
blossom / up from flesh grass.
Oh red-ribboned nymph
there’s an eroticism
to the pearling on your
upper arm: to be obscene,
are you sure his brush
was the only thing
he reached to stroke?
I’m in tentacle
fields under the cerulean
moon, and I’m thinking
about Stendhal syndrome
again: when tentacles
squirm beneath my
pale bare feet, how
I loathe museums!
I want to be
a thieving European;
I want an oil painting
of Stephane Breitweiser
in my mother’s attic.
But how I ache with
the sort of violence
I thought girls had
bred out of them
when I remember
the mother / the licks
of paint and char marks:
she had no right, wounded
wind-up: art-killer.
The syren’s tongue
in my mouth: feeling
for precious melody
for silvery lyric
languidly pressing,
pressing and finding
breathy silence.
There is, posing
nude, an English girl
coating my lips
nasally bilabial hot
caramelized aesthete—
my breastplate shifting
laboring above her
ruddy asthenosphere.
The fisherman sinks
netted and seduced
occupying so many
glittering planes of
conversational being.
Clasped by the throat
unconscious and open-
necked / scaly fin
wrapped just below
the sculpted knee.
The fisherman is the
curly-haired, red-capped
artist; he is a hecatomb
of one, a Sicilian succumbed
condemned to want to hear
dead men sing to him
in his waking sleep
to learn the great gnawing
of the magnificent pain
he cannot pronounce
to cup and drink the froth
of sick and wanting things
which hold in themselves
a boundless desperation.