Award Winners
Cecil Hemley Memorial Award - 2025
Ansel Elkins
Finalist
Geffrey Davis
Speaking to Snakes
When I found the snakeskin, I knew it was a sign
snakes were talking to me. I needed to listen.
My son held up the skin. It reached the length of him.
I came upon a pair of copperheads mating by a dry creek—
snakes were speaking to me. I needed to listen.
They wound earth-brown bodies together, tasted the air, quivering.
I came across copperheads mating by a dry creek.
It was September. The snakes sunbathed in fallen leaves.
They wound exquisite brown bodies together. Tense air quivered.
“Do you know rattlesnakes give live birth?” my friend said.
It was September. The snakes sunbathed in sycamore leaves
like the giant rattlesnake I leapt across at a river baptism with my father.
I didn’t know rattlesnakes gave live birth when I saw
a Pentecostal preacher, his arms laden with rattlesnakes, emerge from the heat
at the Tallapoosa River. I leapt across the king of rattlesnakes. My father
beheaded the snake as she sunbathed. He gave me her bleeding tail.
A sweating Pentecostal preacher emerged, arms laden with rattlesnakes
and gospel: “They shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents.”
My father killed the snake with a garden hoe. Gave me her bloody rattle.
“I named her Dante,” my friend said of a pregnant rattlesnake by her gate.
The gospel says believers will speak in new tongues—they’ll pick up serpents.
Angry white men recited the scripture, hollering about Eve’s sin.
“I named her Dante,” my friend whispered. By the gate
the origin of womanhood is sewn with snakes (so said the men).
Beware the wrath of men who holler of Eve’s sin.
When she was a girl Anzaldúa drank a rattlesnake’s blood.
Our origins: women’s bodies as fields sown with tears.
That night in a dream I saw through snake eyes.
After Anzaldúa drank a rattlesnake’s blood,
she inhabits Coatlicue, snakes-her-skirt, incarnation of the underworld—
in a dream that night she saw through snakes’ eyes:
I passed between the two fangs, / the flickering tongue.
Having come through the mouth of the serpent, / swallowed,
I held up the old skin. It reached the length of him, my son.
Now I dwell in darkness, taste the night with my tongue.
When I found the snakeskin, I knew it was a sign.
Alison C. Rollins on Ansel Elkins
“Speaking to Snakes” is a world populated with a son, a friend, a father, and a sweating Pentecostal preacher. The cyclical nature of repetition in this poem reads like a snake eating its own tail. We encounter Anzaldúa drinking a rattlesnake’s blood and inhabiting Coatlicue. We “beware the wrath of men who holler of Eve’s sin.” From speaking in tongues to being confronted with a rattlesnake’s bleeding tail, this poet guides us through a narration both surreal and grounded. The art of reading signs is unpacked as we move through vignettes or scenes which foreground snakes that are mating, pregnant, dead, or alive. In “Speaking to Snakes,” the speaker reminds us of what it means to not just hear but listen, to “taste the air, quivering.”
**
Ansel Elkins is from Talladega County, Alabama. Her first book, Blue Yodel, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize (Yale Univ Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review, and others. She is the recipient of a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Berea College.
FINALIST
Geffrey Davis is the author of One Wild Word Away (2024) and Night Angler (2019). His debut collection, Revising the Storm (2014), was awarded the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. He is also the co-author of the chapbook Begotten (2016) with F. Douglas Brown. His honors include a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Creative Writing, an Anne Halley Poetry Prize, a Wabash Prize for Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets Prize as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. Davis teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Translation program at the University of Arkansas and in the low-residency MFA program for The Rainier Writing Workshop.