Thank you Savvy Thorne and everyone else at Conclave: A Journal of Character (http://www.conclavejournal.com/issues/issues.html) for nominating my poem, "Our Lady of the Red Potatoes", for the 2016 Pushcart Prize. I'd been working on this poem for six years, and submitting it along the way without landing anywhere. Couldn't give up on it, though.
For those who don't know about Pushcart, or who wish to know more, here is their website: http://www.pushcartprize.com/pushcartpress.html
Our Lady of the Red
Potatoes
Our Lady of the Red Potatoes
has set her altar on a city bench.
She hunches small. No star-blue mantle shielding her from winter light.
Hunger-thin and gray, not old,
in Rhino Records’ parking lot she calls
Red potatoes, red, six for a dollar.
Her eyes squeeze shut. I watch
her roughened hands read each potato’s face.
She listens for their low voices.
Her hands receive the messages
her gods have scrawled there.
Behold, she hands to me
six red potatoes, red, six for a dollar,
thin-skinned potatoes bigger than my fist.
I rasp potato peel, twirl out their eyes,
prepare to receive the mystic mealof red potatoes, red, six for a dollar.
No healing or redemption from our lady,
just nature’s artless poison, pure green gift
of alkaloids, red potatoes green as glass.
They are fallen from the earth into the light,
sun-stroked like their lady.
