Naples, Florida; 2004
by Laurel Moran
(Second Place • Poetry)

I wait in my kitchen in a house the size of a chicken coop. Dishes drip in the dish rack. The frayed, tan carpet looks groomed. I just got a $5 haircut at Joe Cool’s in the strip mall. I’m wearing Land’s End jeans like Mom wore and a unisex t-shirt depicting zebras, water dogs, a lion and a parakeet, all roughly the same size. If only I had let my mother teach me to do eye shadow when I was twelve. Now, his Honda growls outside before he knocks at the back door. As I open the door, the peach and violet sky pushes through crooked pine trees and fallen palm fronds. The man is thrust into my house by the day’s most pregnant light, and I forget I am unprepared. He glows, the rectangular stage of the doorway his lantern, and I see almost nothing of him: not the holes at the neck of his faded t-shirt; not his frizzy, black hair drawing a cloud of zigzags in the dusk around his head. I see only my future.