The Elma Stuckey Poetry Award is presented annually by the English department to two distinguished undergraduate poetry majors. The award was established in 2005 by the Elma Stuckey Poetry Board in honor of its namesake poet, author of The Big Gate (1976) and The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey (1987). Here, we present the winning poems by the awardees for 2008, Jesse Crouse (first place) and Rachel Finkelstein (second place).

First Place
Elma Stuckey Poetry Award
Jesse Crouse

Holiday

I thought I first saw you
when we were crossing the border
into Mexico, or maybe we have never
crossed the border into Mexico.
I know there were weather balloons
floating above us, fireworks for a miniature
Fourth of July.  We tied bottle rockets
to flowers and saw them sail into the air,
taking everything with them.
Walls formed around us
made of the grass and soil,
and all our life was made.
We became a pillar
of grass and sticks placed in a way
that it looked like rain over an hacienda.
We slept forever like weather balloons should,
caring for the air around our thin, trodden bodies.
We had been there since the birth
of the grass and of the land.
Our clothes were made out of flags.
Our skin was calloused and glowing
with closeness. I began to look at you
for as long as I could stand.
Your outline remained in my eyes for years,
and so maybe I was thinking of the future
when I thought I saw you
crossing the border into Mexico.

Jesse Crouse graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 2008 with a B.F.A. in poetry. He now tastes coffee. You can find his work now or forthcoming in Buffalo Carp, Parcel, and P.F.S. Post.

Second Place
Elma Stuckey Poetry Award
Rachel Finkelstein

Translation

Paris, a blue melon in my eye
I am being fed to the concierge. The air smells horrible.
A woman next to me is puking, one hand steadying herself
on the concrete bowl of a bamboo plant.
I can see her face through her spread fingers. It is attractive.
So attractive the stuff being thrown out of her
slows down and waits to be identified (shrimp fried rice).
I say to her, “All of the world is letting us go.”
Made love to her later in a bellboy’s closet.
After I recount my waistcoat buttons,
I buy the most enormous grapefruit I can find.
Look into it like a mirror, a crystal ball, but not both.
In it is the woman in a blue double-breasted blouse
unbraiding her hair with the butt of a revolver.

Rachel Finkelstein earned a B.F.A. in poetry from Columbia in 2008. Her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review and Elephant, and her fiction in Grassroots magazine. This is her second Elma Stuckey Poetry Award.

Illustrations by Abigail Friedman.