INKWELL

Annual Poetry Contest

Jacqueline Henry’s “The Undertaker’s Wife” won first place in the Writer’s Digest 4th Annual Poetry Awards competition, taking home $500 and a Lulu publishing package. Writer’s Market editor and resident WD poetry expert Robert Lee Brewer (blog.writersdigest. com/poeticasides) selected the grand-prize entry.

“ ‘ The Undertaker’s Wife’ works the sorrow of a family losing their son to leukemia against the undertaker’s own family,” Brewer says. “The result is a powerful poem that analyzes the struggle of living and loving.”

The online contest, which pulled in more than 3,000 entries, was open to poems of any style that were original, unpublished and 32 lines or fewer. The top 50 poems from this competition will be printed in a special collection, available at lulu.com.

[THE TOP 10 WINNERS]

1. “The Undertaker’s Wife” by Jacqueline Henry

2. “Los Alamos” by Sherry Hardage

3. “Africa” by Sarah McArthur

4. “white lotus III” by Kelly Grace Smith 5. “Where Do Brooklyn Sneakers Go

When They Die?” by Craig McGuire 6. “La Llarona” by Patricia Dreyfus

7. “QUALITIES OF PAPER” by Jonna Laster

8. “Sunflowers” by Larina Warnock

9. “Inside the Canvas” by Tom Mach 10. “VIET NAM” by Julie Mundy

“The Undertaker’s Wife”
by Jacqueline Henry

You wash your hands before coming to bed.

It’s late and you try to be quiet, but I am already awake, and have been for hours, waiting for the muffled sound

of your car against the driving rain, for halos of headlights to race across the mottled panes of glass.

We barely touch beneath the covers when the phone rings again:

another death, another removal. And then you are gone, leaving

the skies to open amidst a sudden flood of tears. ———

I wake to your form slumped against your son’s door, watching him sleep.

You fought today, you and he. Things were said and now
the weight of the night clings to you like pieces of
shattered glass.

Finally, you shuffle in and I listen to the slush of water
at the sink
as you wash your hands. But death doesn’t wash easily,
no matter

how hard you scrub. ———

Lying next to me, naked, you sigh, “A boy died. He was ten. Leukemia.”

The parents hadn’t slept in years, you could tell that;
he had been fighting
it off for so long. When you enter, the mother is
cradling him like he was a baby,

and you think, this is the way she has always held him. You bring in the cot,

the hunter green bag for the body, and her eyes quiver and her voice strains,

“Please don’t put him in that.” And the father, who had
been sitting alone staring
at his hands, asks, “Can you carry him out?” You nod
and lower your sleeves.

So you wrap the dead boy in his blanket, a boy freckle-
faced and fair-skinned, like
the one at home sent to bed without his supper.

You cradle him in your arms, just like the mother did,
and she kisses his forehead
one last time, and you walk out with her child into the
rain, shielding him

with your face and your hands so he doesn’t get wet.

And you’re thinking, he’s young and he’s sweet and he’s my boy.

“That’s all I could think,” you whisper. “This could be my boy.”

Spooning closer, you cradle my womb with your hands, and I hold them,

these hands, these soft, strong hands that carried the boy and made the son.