WRiting Contest #1

Poetry Examples

If I Had My Own Cooking Show
By Eric-Shabazz Larkin

If I had my own cooking show,

Oh, the things I’d make…

Spider noodles with ant balls

And baked mud cakes.

If I had my own cooking show,

I’d wave to all the girls I know.

I’d make them caramel-covered frogs

And wrap them up in pretty bows.

If I had my own cooking show,

I’d call it “The Dilly-Dallyin’ Cooking Show”

And I’d teach the most Dilly-Dallyin’ recipes I know.

‘Cause it’s my own cooking show.

Michael Built a Bicycle
By Jack Prelutsky

Michael built a bicycle

unsuitable for speed,

it’s crammed with more accessories

than anyone could need,

there’s an AM-FM radio,

a deck to play cassettes,

a refrigerator-freezer,

and a pair of TV sets.

There are shelves for shirts and sweaters,

there are hangers for his jeans,

a drawer for socks and underwear,

a rack of magazines,

there’s a fishtank and a birdcage

perched upon the handlebars,

a bookcase, and a telescope

to watch the moon and stars.

There’s a telephone, a blender, 

and a stove to cook his meals,

there’s a sink to do the dishes

somehow fastened to the wheels,

there’s a portable piano,

and a set of model trains,

an automatic bumbershoot

that opens when it rains.

There’s a desk for typing letters

on his fabulous machine,

a stall for taking showers,

and a broom to keep things clean,

but you’ll never see him ride it,

for it isn’t quite complete,

Michael left no room for pedals,

And there isn’t any seat.

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

By Chen Chen

To be a good

ex/current friend for R. To be one last

inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship

advice for L. To be advice

for my mother. To be a more comfortable

hospital bed for my mother. To be

no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,

America for my uncle, who wants to be China

for me. To be a country of trafficless roads

& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go

fast. To be a cyclone

of laughter when my parents say

their new coworker is like that, they can tell

because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,

can’t be one of them. To be the one

my parents raised me to be—

a season from the planet

of planet-sized storms.

To be a backpack of PB&J & every

thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming

their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,

homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D

& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,

simple decoration for the new apartment

with you. To be close, J.,

to everything that is close to you—

blue blanket, red cup, green shoes

with pink laces.

To be the blue & the red.

The green, the hot pink.

A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales

By Meghan Kemp-Gee

I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.

I have discovered something, an entirely new species

with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy

with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided

armor, its six-toed fitness for these latitudes and its perfect

speckled eggs like forlorn lovenotes, black mammalian eyes pinpricked

with blue as if caught in headlights suddenly. I’ve isolated

a cold-weathered ancestor in its DNA. I’m going to clone

its terrible antlered children, its swarming descendants, outsource

its coiled vertebrate progenitors to secret facilities

hungry for fresh IP. I’ve obtained Steven Spielberg to direct

the lizard’s biography. I will name it after royalty. I am

deliriously pleased. I find myself full of discovery.

I am homesick, boat-sick. I am hotel-room-sick. I want to go home.

Instructions for Building Your First Time Machine
By T.S. Leonard

Don’t. The past is overcrowded with the future 

closer than you think. You blink, that’s one 

eon; a yawn, two. Take a few photographs—

one of your mother, some of your childhood, 

one of the most embarrassing fashion mistakes 

you made in your twenties—stack them up, 

shuffle, deal. Fixate on some thoughtless crack 

you made at that party, years ago. You will live

to make another. You will live again. Try reflecting 

a mirror to another mirror—watch yourself 

replicate endlessly. Try breaking. Paste those 

shards onto a globe; now you’ve made a disco 

ball—change! Step one: forget everything;

step two: forget step one. Step one-two-three: 

if you’re just dancing here that’s good enough; 

when the music stops, stay where you are—

you’re older now than you ever imagined;

you remember wanting to forget. You didn’t. 

Keep walking away from the wreckage.