Certain Things
From The 2024 Magpie Award for Poetry, first-runner up Cicely Grace grounds us within scene and reality in ‘HAVE YOU SEEN PRECIOUS?’.
Here’s what final judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar had to say about this poem:
“[A] strong personal voice, expanding our sense of what a poem can do in the department of story-telling. I loved all the word-filled sentences, the depth and density. A hybrid of lyric prose and the prose poem. Refreshing to see the line subsumed into the sentence. Lots of possibilities of form.” – Renée Sarojini Saklikar
Enjoy the opening lines, excerpted here from Issue 44, Autumn 2024.
HAVE YOU SEEN PRECIOUS?
by Cicely Grace
A rain-blurred sign says HAVE YOU SEEN PRECIOUS?
the image of the kitten long obscured in pools of bleeding
ink. I walk past three more copies tacked to three more
telephone poles, all of them ravaged by rain. Precious was last seen
in October. It is now April, the season for tending,
and I’ve decided to deal with myself. So I’m climbing carpeted stairs
to somewhere I’ve never been, a little office off Arbutus.
A green sign tells me to take off my shoes and I am ashamed
of the smell. A whole winter’s leaking is alive in the lining.
I have the sniffles.
Read the rest of this poem in Issue 44, Autumn 2024
The 2025 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest is Now Open!
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Cicely Grace is a writer based in Vancouver, BC. She holds a degree in English literature from UBC, where she specialized in twentieth-century women’s writing, modernism, gender, and sexuality. Her work has been featured in The Garden Statuary, The Foundationalist, and Contemporary Verse 2. She was the second-place recipient of the 2023 Foster Poetry Prize.
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