Before we tip any vinyl albums
from their cardboard sleeves,
our dance coach demands
100 sit ups.

Basketballs tut next door.
Another coach bellows.
I cradle my skull
in my palms

and fold myself
into myself,
a gardener absorbed
in upending pots,

guiding tendrils to root,
to climb. When I’m almost
done, I feel a nudge
like a cat’s paw.

In my top-secret self.
The self I barely know.
Then a pounce
and a tussle.

Then. Petals rush
from every
thorny
nerve.

The dancer
who weights
my feet says
My turn.

—Lora Keller

JUDGE’S COMMENTS: “This poem uses simile and extended metaphor in surprising and ultimately very lovely ways: each image and comparison is clear, extremely specific, and intentional. The concision of the syntax leaves plenty of room for the reader’s imagination, and the sentences get shorter as the climax approaches – a breathless stuttering. The final two stanzas took my breath away. A cat in the garden, a tussle, and a shower of petals – and the speaker steps into the beauty of her sexuality for the first time. This is a gorgeous, finished poem.”