KARINA MCCORKLE: NC STUDENT POET LAUREATE AWARDS

      Karina McCorkle has been awarded Second Prize (High School Division)in the NC English Teachers Association's 2010 Student Poet Laureate Awards for her poem VESTIGE.  Karina recently shared some details about her background and interests. She will read her poem and receive her award at the NCETA Annual Awards Luncheon at Wake Forest University late October.

I am a 17 year old senior at Enloe Magnet High School who has lived in North Carolina all my life. I have wanted to be a writer since I was six, when another girl told me I could not draw rainbows properly and dashed my dreams of being an artist. I have always been more of a prose writer than a poet, but the Poetic Voices and Writer's Studio electives at Enloe (taught by Priscilla Chappell and Joyce Nelson respectively) have opened me up to a lot of new poets in the past two years, and I have suddenly found myself almost more of a poet than a writer of prose. Amongst my favorite poets areJeffrey McDaniel and Sherman Alexie, and I have a weakness for T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock". When not reading or writing, I am involved in a medieval sword fighting group where I am currently learning rapier and in a puppet troupe at my church.

Vestige

My grandmother was built of cigarettes.

everything smelled like her smoke

house, car, self.

skin so papery

I could feel the ash shifting underneath

like sand in a rag doll.

Her scent permeated our bodies

arriving home, we

scrubbed ourselves raw.

when she died

I wanted to never bathe again

so I wouldn't forget her.

Then I remembered

that I had been breathing her in

my whole life

the pale interior of my lungs

stained black

with her love.

--Karina McCorkle