FAU President Frank Brogan awarded three students $500 a piece for their prose, poetry and photography. Prose winner Jeanne Genis wrote about “stealing pinecones.” Photography winner Todd McFliker took a picture of “fetish circles,” and poetry winner Kira Frederick wrote about “some poems.”

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She Had Some Poems

Kira Frederick

Some of them crouched in closets, their Bathing suits soaking wet and clampedTheir mouths shut with hands sticky from

Ice cream. Some of them got into bikeWrecks but didn’t die. They raced home,Past the sprinkler system, their sneakers

Squishing from the YMCA swimming pool.Some of them didn’t care and chuckedCigarettes out the back window. They

Danced and spat in their birthdayDresses and lost their virginity in theSweltering heat. He was too fast and

Careless and his body shone like August.She had some poems that slid like glass,That danced in kitchens and ate grapefruit.

These were the ones slender as horsesWho dared to jump out of her. TheyCould swallow her, hollow as a prayer

And then she could stop kneeling. She hadSome poems that kissed with their eyesClosed, and danced feverishly like trees

That autumn when her temperature soared to100 and 3 degrees. She had some poems thatClenched her mother’s hand in hospitals until

The anesthesia set in, who breathed on herWindow pane like the metallic mouths ofTrains when she was somber of sleepy.