Honors in Creative Writing
Mary Kinzie Prize for Poetry
The Escapist
It is fear that leaves me
dropping into my recesses,
popping memory open like
a folding chair and watching,
from its sagging depths,
the parade pass by:
neighbors chattering in the streets,
a home that you know is loving
from the way the deck chairs are arranged.
It was my grandmother who taught me
that visions don’t have to be religious,
that these moments of quiet baptism
in the font of inherited memory
don’t mean sainthood,
but something haloed nonetheless.
I know without asking
that she is seeing the same thing.
That the scenes were sewn
into the hems of her stories,
and woven into my mind among them.
These places could be real, she’d say.
We can let them be real.