Great River Review

ALT Great River Review 3rd Annual Pink Poetry Prize for $1,000 $2 to submit / closes Jan 16, 2022 / greatriverreview.com We welcome visual & written poetry!

ALT Poem Title: ABOUT SOLACE AND MY NEED TO SHUCK OYSTERS Poem Text: I’ll admit, sometimes I wish the entirety of my body was bite and tongue. How peaceful it must be to have no memory. What would I know about the pain of being unable to speak if my father could never spin stories about the times when all of us were mouthfuls? All flesh, no heart. No knees that men could demand I bend. My existence hinged upon nothing but my own jaw. My abalone song pinging against the glass echo chamber of an aquarium existence. A world in which I cannot see the walls, but the pebbles and canyons mime the outline of their presence. What’s it like, I wonder, to make beautiful everything that has come to murder you? To be immune to all but the most glorious and bloody deaths? No pearl to mother, I pull sand from the fresh trench of my three-hundred-and- thirteenth cut, laugh wordlessly as life writes the script of my death—no doubt a comedy of wrongs. By the time I count a thousand, I’ll be little more