Dawn Dupler
Contest - Prose Poem
Dawn Dupler is the 2024 Winner of the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize and the 2023 Winner of MacGuffin’s Poet Hunt. She was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2024 Vivian Shipley Poetry Contest, named Semifinalist for the 2023 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been featured on the buses and trains of St. Louis’s MetroLink, in Natural Bridge, Red Rock Review, Moon City Review, and other journals. She is also an Associate Editor of december literary journal.
Furniture Bones
What if we break down our interiors—this overstuffed couch, already 10 years old when mom died and still smelling of her skin cream, this dining room table with the extra leaf we keep just in case of grandchildren. That leather recliner with the prematurely broken back. We could harvest all this wood: red oak, cherry, pine. Cut away the cushions, pop the nails. Pile together their legs, ribs, buckled vertebrae into a kind of cathedral. If we believed enough, could we really make this a tree again? If we watered the bones. Coaxed them back into sapling. Entertained this mad idea of regeneration.
“ I’m intrigued with the idea of things reverting to their ‘natural state,’ so I had fun with the idea of furniture—or the bones of furniture—regressing back to trees. But it’s really more than just getting a tree to grow again, isn’t it? This poem is inspired by these ideas. ”