This year, Exposé awards its first poetry prize, part of our effort to reflect the range of writing by students and scholars across the university community. The winner is Theodoretus Ignatius Breen for his long poem “The Farm.” The judge, Christina Davis of the Woodberry Poetry Room, described Breen as having “immediately evident linguistic gifts.” The poem is set in a blueberry farm in Crownsville, Maryland, where Breen was raised. “My memory of this place is unclear,” says Breen, “and in this work I strive both to clarify the significance of this location and to address the uncertainties of my mind.”
I. I was born into the baconed ridge of derelict unpave, where fig & blueberry hung, quietly seeded,
II. obstinate, as the sagging wood— vertically dried façade of shack ever moistened within by the unseen concavity of the grease’sscent belched forth from rancid coffer.
III. That house was not mine, but that of the ancestral cloistress, not father’s mother, but mother of mother not mine of brother half fraternal birthed to same plot of vaccinium spread.
IV. There were seven siblings. And I was but a chrisomer, the tepid oil’s unctuous pungence then obscuring in warmth memory, save for my femoral sundering and the wagon of crippled pull, which I could falsely recall; green-paneled hollowness of plastic rolled beneath the border of large house and the woods, the play of light clasping through leafed ensnare as when, in darkness, I have closed my eyes deeply witnessing the empty patterns.
V. I returned; years later— the hermetic woman, yet stowing in hickory attic the rifle, spoke, with unintelligible gaze, as the jaundiced clippings of McCarthyan portention scattered forth attacked only the settled motes of fat-laden dust. I did not sleep there.
VI. I slept with father in the cotted below, unlighted cabin festering with arachnid creep ever close to ear and seen in leaving day with opisthosomatic swell, ciliated, filled with venom & obliviate disdain for our elevation as we slept in loft reached only by the ladder.
VII. The cabin was below, in the forest which now I have seen, approached by the rutted path of vehicles unknown, bordered by wildflower, passing kempt field & prickled briar, isthmus of grass amidst trodden dirt followed by self and father and siblings who slept apart.
VIII. Was Ambrose there?
IX. And beneath the tall trees sarsaparilla weaved amongst black soil kissing brown leaves to rot as we bent and I placed the root into mouth, viscous sweet unsettlingly twinged with bitterness, crudely mixed with earth beside the cabin.
X. The descent continued, though we could not, fall of leaf loudly dragged further by steep incline until rushed by lowest ravine, drowning long-smoothed rock as strain of penetrate light falling prey to the encompassing brown rusted arbitrarily the spots dictated by the foliaged negligence.
XI. The rope swing was the center of all, the branches & ravine & cabin & decay & sarsaparilla & grease & descent & rifle & I clutched the twined cords of browning white hearing the polish of rock trickle fifty feet below.
XII. I yearned for above the chasm; my siblings did not mind, though they stood amidst death echoed yet in sinuous batter of the lapping water, originated by light pull of hand gracing curved metal ever surrounded by wood now surrounded by tilted hickory, and perhaps the sound could be heard from where it now rests, but all is now past, their mother not mine I had never met, neither in memory nor false.
XIII. Once, by accident, I knew, that Ambrose had released the rope, but as his mother.
This year, Exposé awards its first poetry prize, part of our effort to reflect the range of writing by students and scholars across the university community. The winner is Theodoretus Ignatius Breen for his long poem “The Farm.” The judge, Christina Davis of the Woodberry Poetry Room, described Breen as having “immediately evident linguistic gifts.” The poem is set in a blueberry farm in Crownsville, Maryland, where Breen was raised. “My memory of this place is unclear,” says Breen, “and in this work I strive both to clarify the significance of this location and to address the uncertainties of my mind.”