3rd place winner of the poetry contest: Harlem Shadows -Charles Gillispie

 
                                                                                           for Claude McKay
 
                                                                              In the middle of Harlem, he manages
                                                                              to scratch out a sonnet on the subway.
                                                                              Strict to form, pencil-smudged, it imagines
                                                                              the grace of his childhood home. On display,
                                                                              flowers and birds, his mother and good friends;
                                                                              a benevolence that shines from the moon,
                                                                              wets the morning grass and pools on his skin--
                                                                              a light that might help him find a new home.
                                                                              But New York city is already white
                                                                              with snow—strange to a man from Jamaica--
                                                                              and curiously hostile toward his plight
                                                                              to get to work on time, between stanzas.
                                                                              The sonnet, like a fresh hole in his shoe,
                                                                               has voyeur's lust for a life he once knew.



​
​Charles Gillispie received his MFA from the University of Arizona. He is a licensed counselor specializing in the use of expressive arts. He has published two collections of poems, The Way We Go On (University of Nebraska Press, 2010) and Ever Loyal to the Story (League of Minnesota Poets, 2023, winner of the John Rezmerski Memorial Book Award). Most recently, his poems have appeared in ACM, December, Oberon, and Psychological Perspectives.