Winning Poem: 12-Hour Couplets Contest

I am pleased to announce that Ella Harrigan is the winner of the 12-Hour Couplets Contest for her poem "Mother." Ella Harrigan is a poet and student at Swarthmore College, where she is a senior editor at the magazine Small Craft Warnings. She was the 2020 Virginia Ball Creative Writing Competition winner, the 2021 Claudia Ann Seaman winner in nonfiction, and has been published in Polyphony Lit and the Swarthmore Review.

Mother

yes, imagine it. what, on accident, i took

from you. the apartment bright and piled with books

 

rising from the floor like hills.

flowers from a friend on the windowsill.

 

and you, in the shower, humming, washing your hair.

your beautiful long hair.

 

imagine me unborn, my brother sitting in his old bedroom,

home for the summer, picking his nails. his guitar untuned.

 

you love him. the red that shines through his beard

reminds you of your father. the rest isn't clear.

 

in the kitchen, your mother calling on the phone,

worrying at you. hoping you're home.

 

you unborn, your mother on roller skates,

a waitress serving milkshakes.

 

her mother, raving mad, had visions of terrible futures

and made them known. stitching stories like sutures.

 

her mother on the telephone, promising wounds.

they're coming, she said, just you wait. soon.