Award Winners
Lyric Poetry Award - 2023
Casey Thayer
From the Blue Dusk Suddenly
In the tally of what
I’m no longer allowed
to describe, if stars are first,
& second, the revelation
they’re dead, & third,
any species of bird,
perhaps next on the list
of what I’m no longer
allowed to describe
are deer, blank-faced
& fragile when held
against the hunter’s gun.
What can I do with them
when they dip beneath
the clothesline & stretch
their necks like dancers
warming up? I have been
doing so well believing
in the existence of a love
free from want on a night
when I wouldn’t need
the crows scattering
like a blast of iron filings,
the deer flitting in fear
for the cover of the black
tree line under the star’s
dead light to explain it.
Tonight, I’m not trying
to engage with beauty—
the white-tails, heads
lowered, searching out
corn-scraps left after
harvest, working ever
closer to the road.
Casey Thayer is the author of Rational Anthem, finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and Self Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has been honored with the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize for his collection Love for the Gun, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He lives in Chicago