Yvanna Vien Tica (above) wins a 2024 Zócalo Poetry Prize honorable mention for "Bildungsroman." Courtesy of Yvanna Vien Tica.
Every year, we award the annual Zócalo Poetry Prize to the poem that best evokes a connection to place. Zócalo is pleased to recognize four honorable mention submissions for 2024.
—after Frederic Edwin Church’s “Mt. Ktaadn”
because the trees carry no names;
because the peaks spear the sky
like nails biting into familiar mangoes;
because I had not spoken Tagalog in weeks;
because my mother had texted me a picture
of the first red berries of our aratilis tree;
because the painted cows bowed like the cows
on my grandfather’s farm, their jowls
sagged with age; because in the second before
I read the description, I mistook this American
mountain for the gentler slopes of Mount Makiling;
because our myths believe Mount Makiling is the fossilized
body of a kind goddess or an alternate Calypso
spiriting men away into marital happiness;
because, like the boy in the corner of the painting,
I had also trusted our aratilis tree to bear my weight
those young evenings I had plotted to leave—leaving being the central
conflict I assume he has also chosen; because, like me, the boy would not
withhold anything from a goddess who whisks him home;
because, like me, he could grow to forget time’s distance;
because from that distance our lives held
the same inexplicable element of loss.