Award for New Poets, 3rd Place Winner: Self-Portrait No. 5 by Cynthia Manick
We’re all very excited to share with you the winners of the 2018 Award for New Poets, selected by Victoria Chang. Today, we have “Self-Portrait No. 5” by Cynthia Manick—a lovely poem of birds and bellies and the inevitable struggle to love oneself. Stay tuned for our second place poem by Cara Waterfall tomorrow, and our winner Kirk Schlueter’s poetry on the 28th. Thank you to everyone who submitted this year!
Self-Portrait No. 5 (Phoenix and Lullabies)
Some people think I was born
savagebiting at hands clouds and daggers
with no softness to be foundbut I contain
whispersbright coral beads stacked
the language of blood jostling against itself,
coconut oilcurves molded by my mother’s thumb
broad bones and something wild.Sometimes I’m
a brown bellysong birdwho knows the tongue
can be a land not beatenthe hot arch ache
in someone’s backwhile the TV’s on,
or it can be a pistol.It covers allmy gristle barbs
blue and yellow howlsand the rag doll heart,
where I shook off my father’sbaritone
the day he left.I turn brine lakethat never stirs
the same way twicesalt assholes and smiles
boiled over.It’s not a lie to saythat I’m still learning
to lovethe frames of undressed tressmy glasses
the Medusa hair that defiesevery combred
pomegranatesmy baby selfthe little girl
inside who still cravesmodel trains Josie and
the Pussycats cartoonand wonders about the spaces
between the teeth and the ribs.
Cynthia Manick
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts among others. Winner of the 2016 Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry and the 2018 Elizabeth Sloan Tyler Memorial Award; Manick is the Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her poem "Things I Carry Into the World" was made into a film by Motionpoems, a organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month and Reel 13 Shorts. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Muzzle Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.
