NFSPS College/University Level Poetry Awards 

Jason Bradford, Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa: His manuscript, Remembering the Future,
won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award.

Moriah Erickson, College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, Minnesota: Her manuscript, Night Boat,
won the Florence Kahn Memorial Award.

Meredith Sims, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana: 1^st Runner-Up for Cirque
Jill McFee, Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas: 2^nd Runner-Up for God’s Blue Walls;
Nathan W. Friedman, Virginia Commonwealth Univ.: 3^rd Runner-Up for Landscapes Through Glass at High Speed.

TWO POEMS BY JASON BRADFORD, EDNA MEUDT AWARD

Slumber 

Sometimes love creeps in
through the window
by moonlight, crumpled and thin
my mouth forms a gaping grin
with drool dripping like a faucet, slowly
love creeps in
like a weeping viola between
two shadows
lost in the moonlight. Crumpled and thin
I lay sleeping, dreaming,
waiting, knowing like a child knows:
You’re real ... and love seeps in
beneath the door like a flooding ravine
my blood ebbs and flows
with the moonlight, you crumble and thin
like leaves falling
under an autumn wind
love creeps in
by moonlight, crumpled and thin.

Usually, I Hate Winter

but today is different.
The bright gray everything is shifted askew:
covered with a frozen fog,
tree limbs, like spider legs, scratch the sky
in search of something,
anything in particular, or of particles
among the chirping sparrows
flapping wings like heart ventricles,
they beat the air empty of cold.
Memories like snowflakes
cover the ground, create lush slush piles
where sometimes, things never change. 

TWO POEMS BY MORIAH ERICKSON, FLORENCE KAHN AWARD

 In a Tree 

I was flipping
through old pictures, discolored
by twenty years.
I came across my favorite, me up
in the crotch of the big shagbark
hickory out back, wearing red and black
flannel and cowboy boots.
My dad was there then,
smiling under his thick tinted lenses,
his sideburns curling around his cheeks.
He had a Camel pinched
between his lips so he couldn’t really smile.
It was just me and him,
unrehearsed, no one
behind the camera coaxing.
I can't see it, but I know
I had the slingshot in my back pocket.
We had just spent an hour
rocketing acorns at the neighbors'
lazy old heifer.
The leaves were dying.
None had fallen but they had browned
on the tree.
I was only four or five, with a
fading shiner, yellow on green.
I squinted into the sun,
baffled by its brilliance.

Leaving

His heavy green canvas bag,
big as my young body, strapped and stained
waits by the door. I ask my Daddy
can he carry me in it, and I climb
up into his lap, feel his face quake
under my touch.
His cheeks are bristled
and stroking them is rough
on both of us.
His chin pulls in, wrinkles
as if stung by my goodbye kiss.
I don't get that
he might die, a bomb
tucked under the sand
or in a car parked on the side of the road
could erupt in a shower of shrapnel.
I don't get that
he has my first and second
grade pictures in his bag—
those years he missed.
I will mail him my
third grade picture too,
which will take weeks to find him.
I’ll talk to him from home,
tell him school is going well
when it's not, that Mom is holding up okay
and I love him.
And I don't get that
the hours between where he is
and where I am will add up to forever
and he will be so different then.