Winner of the 2024 Contest in Poetry. Read judge V. Penelope Pelizzon’s blurb here.

Invocation

…come, family, / & ride through the rooms of my house.

—Aracelis Girmay, “Invocation”

There is a woman with soft brown hair & a creased

white shirt, a silver chain across her collar,

there is a forest surrounding a stream & a stereo playing

music from the back porch. There is a girl in boys’ clothing

with dirty hair, ankles, knees—

maple leaves & sticky bark, daydreams

& drawings, quiet rustle of summer heat in the treetops.

Come, Amelia, Domenico, Josephine, Marianna, come,

with all the dusty streets & thimbles, spools of thread

& table wine and home-baked bread, come 2 o’clock nap

& peppercorns, the soap opera set in a hospital,

Italian ballads from the ‘40s, come

starched sheets & rosary beads clicking after midnight, come

faces of the saints, printed, laminated & pinned into our sweaters,

come slender chains around our necks, chains with cornicello & cross,

come crucifix & nectarines & plums—

& come electric candles on the windowsill,

& come leotard & ballet class, come street lights,

come pavement, come hand-holding on the blacktop,

come sweet kiss of first real love, come

sea-breeze & marsh reeds, fishing nets & bicycles, come cousins,

come dinnertime, come smooth stones & sea snails, &

Dante, come Zia, come shoulders and wrists, knotted

knuckles & fingers, come brass instruments & skirts,

swinging, come night balcony & oregano,

garlic, salt, come high day over the volcano & the cobalt water of the bay—

a god within a girl with sketches behind her eyes,

mouth a soft turn, sunlight pouring over my shoulders

filling each cell of my chest and spine with hearing & light &

come, then, loved ones, shape the landscape that I am.

Into my heart, lungs, air, come, synaptic learning,

the body’s hidden memories, which arrive when asked, then waited for,

come tender & let your tenderness make me holy.