2025 Barrett Winner
1st Place Alaina Schnell
She swaggers into the bowling alley
every Friday night. Flared bell bottom blue jeans draped over her washed-out pink Converse.
Her hair was so loud.
It rang through the empty Bellies of every bowling ball It's pink and greys
And purples and blues
Escape shape as it rattled melodically With violence
Oh yeah
she was real cool
but unlike Gwendolyn Brooks too scared to skip school.
So she rebelled by sticking Newports between her plush, blood-pigmented lips and swiping vodka from her mother's mahogany liquor cabinet.
Her mind, a rubber-banded ball of wit
even the cacophony of sounds that bounced off her tongue carried a spunk.
A spitfire, they called her.
Naive and drunk on optimism, too,
For she believed she alone could massage The minds of the masses pumping
Them with news of
An upcoming second-wave
Of women who would march with their Mothers' rage to Washington
She killed the sensations.
Felt from pinching her index finger By rubbing a pencil against it
For eight years
And she wrote and wrote. But her articles must've been Clumsy and juvenile
And deemed too lousy to Be archived
Because she exited the seventies, Without a mark of her youth.
And
She, Ada, recites these stories
to herself with fried lungs and flat words,
Unaware she is
entrapped in skin that sags like a gallon
of milk in a plastic bag and inhabits a cluttered Apartment, lined papers stuck to the wooden floor and loaded with cursive passion.
And she writes and writes.