No one could miss that red flash darting
between tall pines, slipping into shadows then
reappearing like a scarlet rabbit pulled from a hat.
If she’d chosen a brown jacket, a green hunter’s cap,
she might never have encountered the wolf.
The girls locked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
didn’t wear red. They were too poor to dress
in the clothes they labored over 52 hours a week.
But, it was red a witness saw as he watched
one girl, her brown dress and red hair aflame,
plunge like a living torch to the pavement.
In my family, when someone dies women buy
a new dress—black or navy, never red.
Years ago, men took care of funeral arrangements
and women to fill the long hours between the death
and watching the casket lowered into the ground,
went shopping. My mother bought me
a navy blue dress to wear to my boyfriend’s funeral—
a boy who drunkenly drove his car off the road
on French Island killing himself and his cousin,
leaving his cousin’s bloodied girlfriend to crawl
out of the wreck and lie on the side of the highway,
shards of windshield embedded in her red sundress
twinkling in moonlight.
Judge’s Comment:
“I chose ‘Red’ as the First Prize Winner for a number of reasons. The reader is immediately engaged at the beginning by the language and the images—those first three lines are a marvel—and by the surprise of the stanza’s final line when we learn that the reference is to Little Red Riding Hood. Then, suddenly, we are transported in the second stanza to an altogether different scene: the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where the girls could not afford to wear that dangerous red but instead were engulfed the red of real fire. The third stanza again introduces an abrupt shift, this time to the personal: a family story, where the women do not wear, or burn, red. The seeming non-sequitur of the “navy blue dress” of the speaker begins the shocking final stanza, where we see red again in the horror of the ‘bloodied girlfriend’ lying on the side of the highway in her shard-perforated ‘red sundress.’ The entire poem is a triumph of surprise and shock, woven seamlessly together to produce the maximum impact. “