Student Wins National Poetry Contest
Sarah Cross, MS 3
Sarah Cross won first and second place in the national William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition for her poems Monarch and The Little Sister. Sarah’s poetry will be reprinted in the Journal of Medical Humanities this year, and appears in the Pritzker Pulse with their permission.
Monarch
by Sarah Cross, MS 3
At nine I raised Monarch butterflies—they arrived
in their caterpillar bodies—arched inchers of luminous fur.
I sheltered them in houses of glass, crossed with sticks.
Amazing cocoons—they
shut themselves away
into white cabinets locked from the inside, their tissue tanks
stood in silence around each other, hopeful, patient.
Morning they broke free—a thousand suns, small centers
of new orange—through the self-spun gauze, they shook
and pulled their gossamer wings apart, wet with slumber.
On the roof I clenched my hand to unveil a folded flier, thin panels
of black and carrot crepe paper joining at a tubular body.
They lighted off my palm to rise, cloud the sky and vanish.
What would I turn into after a hiatus, a deep-soul sleep?
Wings, smoldering webs of muscle and silk, unfurling from
my nine year old back, to pulse in the sky, quick, quivering.
with nothing, nothing on my mind, but the wind.
