Polka Dotted Spring Poem

2024 Barrett Winner

1st Place Alaina Schnell

How could one write about spring
without flirting with beehives
and sunburnt boys who makeout
with beer cans and raven eyed girls

Spring poems don’t exist
if you can’t rhyme sun
with sultry swim suits
that we bought on sale

When December’s pessimism was present
in our christmas letters and batter mixed with
too much egg and not enough eye contact

Y’know, the polka dotted suits sliced into two?
Yes! Those ones! The ones we slid into after school

in mid May; The sun hissed and slapped our bare bellies
leaving a loud red mark your sister
laughed at, saying you’re too nice to dress

like a girl who gives mean hickeys
You ought to wear your smart church dress
to the beach so the boys playing
volleyball know not to invite you to
the court- or introduce you to their couch
(the salmon colored beat to shit kind)

But of course you wore the swimsuit
because grains of sand hugging your
thighs as you giggle with splashing
tides On a school night with a boy
that you’ll never see again was

A spring poem
(But it felt like summer)

You had to write about.
You wove his bruised wrists in-
to the opening line
‘cause you forgot his name
and the number of white
zits you counted on his
chin and how his marble
eyes made up for those zits

You sprinkled each couplet with salt water
and your exclamation marks flipped upside down
into an i, rose petals hanging their
legs off its dot; the semi colons hope
your ode to the silk magnolia pet-
als that swam through his waved hair never stop

But I don’t think he spoke about you
in the way you wrote about him
he didn’t tell them about the
strawberry freckles that walk a-
cross the bridge of your nose or your
fits of laughter that the
seagulls carried home to their young

He told them about your polka dotted
swimsuit and how it looked better in the
sand than on you
he talked in block letters
and without a clue

He experienced a spring poem

Although It felt like summer
on that mid-may day,
it was still spring
because you both rose for school the next day