Take a look at the winning January 2011 submission for our monthly writing contest, Hot Tin Roof. This month, we feature two poems by Iowa Writer’s Workshop alum Margaret Lemay-Lewis.
Hot Tin Roof
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Hot Tin Roof: Witness
The car crossed over the median and crashed, head-on, into the passenger van–empty, you find out later, of its typical brood of children, who were spending that evening at a soccer tournament.
The thunderous crash, a deafening concussion of metal, was worse than you could have imagined, and then you saw it–Was it? Yes. It was–A man. You saw a man flying through the air and for a second, maybe, you hoped he would float smoothly away with the flock of birds spraying from the wild roadside brush.
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Hot Tin Roof: Agates
The land beneath the trap had been in our family since before the time of steel and always without poachers. We had taken it from the Indians who had in antiquity taken it from their own or those like them. That history we owned and we were unabashed. We did not think of them as savages because our fathers had taught us to think of ourselves as savages. We thought of them as obsolete. We were the inheritors of their earth. We are not apologizers.
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Hot Tin Roof: Reflective Surfaces
Read the October winner of Little Village‘s Hot Tin Roof writing contest.
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Hot Tin Roof: There Is Always Cake
It can be said that strawberries are undisputedly good. This is a truth universal in nature. Strawberries are good, and so is cake. Combine these two things. No one will argue. What you do when you can’t convince that boy you love with all the bite-size pieces of your heart to simply love you back? […]
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Hot Tin Roof: Hermaphrodite in Iowa
You think kissing your inner thighs is easy. You think you can stand there while I lick you ON and OFF. It’s true. There is electricity. That new currency you have been paying me with. For kissing me, you say, I will pay you with my electricity, my chemistry, my biological appliances. My reply: Surely […]
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Hot Tin Roof: Soft Spot
It was late May and school was out. Em was on the porch steps watching her dog. She had been watching the dog for some time. The dog had stopped moving as much as usual, and now stopped altogether. Tufts of fur had been falling away from its body. This had gone on for weeks. […]
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Hot Tin Roof: Year
1
The cage in my chest is rusted, it holds
robotic nuns. They spew sparks.
They light each others’ cigarettes.
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Hot Tin Roof: Space Tacos
You like science, and that’s okay. I like feelings, and that’s fine, too.
After our debates about science which lead to bigger issues of belief, God, and death, you tell me I’m smart and then maybe I cry a little because of leftover childhood feelings of insignificance …
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Hot Tin Roof: Excerpt from the Novel, 'The Fourteenth Colony'
Around one, I heard the car pull in the driveway, the front door open, uneven footsteps across the floor. The radio came on, blasting out the Top 40 station. I pulled the covers up to my ears. I could tell she was really drunk by how many times she stumbled into furniture and cursed. I […]
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Hot Tin Roof: Mason
This morning, out to borrow a floor jack, I opened the metal door to my brother’s garage, and there sat my nephew, hunched over the plywood workbench, moving a straight screwdriver carefully into a one-pound block of paraffin wax. His hands were covered in little specks of white, like wool gloves. It was a Sunday. […]
