Award Winners
Lucille Medwick Memorial Award - 2025
Ina Cariño
What’s the First Word in “Illegal Immigrant”?
“A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force.” — Isaac Newton
sun-smirked body / gentle slope of nose / hilltop teeth / grit / stone / are you a dangerous body lost / in frond of fern / grass tall as / a white man / & still you are a moon / mourning / small as little cheek of child / giant as a hot air balloon floating in an oil painting / that your father smudged together when you still had your milk teeth / your startled body / motherbody / fatherbody / daughter-son-sister-brother-infantbody / rib-poke shrub & airport shiver / scene with broken watch / portrait with dirt-torn doll / a purpling landscape / where something keens with bravado / but that feels much more like loneliness / see women & their fake leather clutches / clutching / as someone looks them up & down / see brown boys / their sweat dripping circles / into dust / do you know what it’s like to fly across the ocean eternally alone / oh mudbodies / skybodies / shrugging-sick-in-the-dark bodies / you’ve already met them / at the post office / in the dinge of a nightclub / in the local library backrooms / or the arboretum in spring / they are enjoying the sunlight / they are turning their faces to the magnolia trees / they are pressing their hands into the breeze / they close their eyes, imagine / the warmth of a dusty street flanked / by market stalls in the blooming dusk / fireworks & fish / street barbeque & stretched candy hot / fresh on a bamboo stick / tips singed / heart singed / singing / do you know what they see behind sleepy lids? / yesterday’s house / a falling-down building / but lit up with a familiar red lantern hung high on rope / maybe it’s illegal to be / that happy / again / but it’s not too late to hope / that the man with the crystal cart around the corner will gift you / a craggy shimmerstone / which guides you / to the garden / & finally / home
Natalie Scenters-Zapico on Ina Cariño
“What’s the First Word in ‘Illegal Immigrant’?” does what all great prose poems do, it rewards circular, repetitive reading. With each read I was struck completely by the speaker’s engagement with how people are forced to embody the word “illegal” by the state and how they find integral space despite it. Prose-poem, while still embracing the tradition of the lyric, this poem ends with the human desire for home. The poem sings for the bodies of the undocumented forced to carry this hateful term by the state, “oh mudbodies / skybodies / shrugging-sick-in-the-dark bodies / you’ve already met them.” And, haven’t we met them? Yes. But the poem forces the reader to ask: Have we seen them?
A poem that navigates how the undocumented body finds its way by looking up, looking down, looking across that which cannot be crossed or navigated except for by “a craggy shimmerstone / which guides you / to the garden / & finally / home.” A poem that begs to be engaged aloud, in private, and in community—a beautiful meditation on what it means to be a body in motion in a globalized world that forces mass migration.
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Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry originally from the Philippines. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. Their forthcoming collection Reverse Requiem is slated for publication in April 2026 (Alice James Books).