Cox took home first place in the Adam Gayhart Memorial Poetry Slam, held April 18, at David A. Howe Library in Wellsville. The competition is named after the late Adam Gayhart, an aspiring young poet who grew up in Alfred and passed away in 2017 at 34. This year’s event was the 12th annual poetry slam organized by the Allegany Arts Association.
For the competition, Cox read three of his poems: “Stirred” and “Vespers” (both written in 2014), and “Still Life with Window” (written in 2015).
“The one that the audience seemed to admire the most of these three, “Stirred,” is about what I would call taking care. Taking care is what the rural poor may do, or used to do, to know the beauty in their lives,” Cox said. Following is the text for “Stirred’:
One strawberry flipped from the bowl,
Light thud, barely audible—skid, not a roll.
She scooped it with delicate touch,
Its sticky dripping much too luscious
To risk losing as she groped and grabbed
The stiffened dishrag, stooped and dabbed
Or rather smeared the glistening juicy streak
That filled one of the peeling linoleum’s cracks.
Still balancing the berry aloft, twisting the tap
To wet the cloth and squeeze it out with one hand,
She wiped up all traces of the wreck—her floors
Clean enough to eat off—the berry daintily turned,
Restored by sparing dribbles from the faucet.
The garden flourishing this June, the spring
Just right for that fat patch of plump, firm, not-one-to-be-wasted.
The traveler back in its bowl, she rinsed and wrung the rag,
Newly stung by doubt: how to replace the scuffed linoleum
When she could not even afford a small carton of cream.
