2021 Annual Contest Portrait Category Winners

Congratulations to the winners of our annual poetry contest! Thank you to everyone who entered the contest. The following portrait poems were judged by Dana Yost. He was so impressed with the submissions. Enjoy the winning poems :)

FIRST PLACEStopping in at La Leona Roadhouse, Patagonia, ArgentinaBy Peter ColsonOn the way to the fish camp,we stop in at a roadhouse, searchingfor Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, not Newmanand Redford (“Kid, I never shot anybody before.”)but the real deals.Three cowboys wager whiskey on hook and ringnext to the poker table.My guide Gabriela,a tatted, twentysomething redhead,leans back into the bar and cools the hard trailstares before flicking her chin back to the wall.Beneath a $10,000 bounty and bowlers,the banditos yanquis pose in tintypeand unarmed, like dandies.Years horse thieving and rustling colored civilbut gone straight to robbing banks and trains.Likenesses sketched on a movie posterhang near, their expressions pained and fatedto their Hollywood deaths by folly and overkill.They hid out here after a bank job, mullingthe dullness in Bolivia against dancinghead in a noose anywhere else.A fourth cowboy strums a guitar, bawls out a verseabout a broke gaucho who can’t feed his horse,and the trio garrotes the chorus.(“Who are those guys?”)On her way to the door, Gabriela cuts the linesnagging the ring midflight and swingsfor a bull’s eye, then downs the bets riding the rail.The boys look bushwhacked.A smile escapes outside, and she whispers,“I’m better when I move.”The tire tracks vanish over rock east of Fitz Roy,and Gabriela steers spurning cairnsand compass, but I don’t second guess, my notionsdrawing dead in the good company of outlaws.

SECOND PLACEFrederick Manfred1912 – 1994By Roberta HaarHis hands like origami birdsin constant transformation.When he was lying in the hospitalhe told me, “One day I lookedat the calendar and the numbersbegan to fall off the page.”His demands that I keep writing,to send him everything,to overcome doubt thatI had “the stuff.”His imperious wishes,his imposing letters.Yet, to think now,walking the River Bottom,driving along the chalk-rock bluffs,visiting the monument toStruck by the Ree,lunching at the Fort Randall Baitshop.The lilacs overflowing their dampwrapped newspaper, cut from Roundwindfor my graduation andmy little place on Summit Avenue,convening amongst my second-hand furniture,and second-hand books and stolen flamingo.His asserting that I drive his long white carto the Twin cities for his St Paul event.He said I looked “powerful” behind the wheel.The black-tie dinner at the Governor’s mansion withtall Timberwolves at our table,“Whose that old guy you’re with?”His dangerously introducing me as“The Poet” to everyone at the gala event.Then there was talk of Stockholm,investigating his University of Minnesotaarchives: tax papers,epistles, carbon copies ofall the lettershe had ever writtenincluding those written to me.Most of all, I cannot forget eclectic Roundwind,his tee pee office poking out of the prairie withphotos (mine too)books (“I read three at a time”)his typewriter, the finishedlizard manuscript and piles and piles of books.The self-built mantelmade with field stonespicked with care,his pressure-cooking garden food,and placing me at the oppositeend of his long table.There, listening to his vivid, sometimes gaudy stories(baseball, basketball, tuberculosis,crawling on the prairie and eating insectsto know Hugh Glass, Crazy Horse,Black Elk, Blue Mound,poets he loved and women he loved too).All the while watching the sun set in the western skywith swallows crisscrossing the valley below.

THIRD PLACEDanny 1958-2019By Bill QuistAfter years of midnight calls,slurred words, seizures,the time they found youin a snowbank hypothermic, blue,we finally got the news you’dmade it through, coughing bloodlike Kerouac to some satoricaught for the big beyond.I’d already written your eulogya hundred times but still it cameas a surprise. You, star of ourpsychedelic youth, what visiondid I miss this time that tookyou to the edge and over,and what was it about whiskeythat you still didn’t understand?In the Black Hills I found a pieceof rose quartz that reminded me of you,sort of stooped when stood on end,gentle and sad with grace. I hung iton the fence and when we sit arounda fire it looks like you did, holdingsomething we don’t know, smile of mysteryand promise of something better on your face.