N30B Winners

Madeleine Cravens won First Place in Narrative’s Thirteenth Annual Poetry Contest and in the 2020 Narrative 30 Below Contest. A 2022–2024 Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she received her BA from Oberlin College and is an MFA candidate at Columbia University.


FIRST PLACE WINNER


Object Permanence and Other Poems

by Madeleine Cravens


Object Permanence

I want to know how things will end. I’ve heard of the beginning,
how grains of pollen fell from the poplars. Then a little choral

music, cavalry, bright skirmish on the hillside, a thousand
years of this. Here is a flute and here is a steamship. Here is a gun


and your grandmother’s ring. The devil has seven blue heads,
and when we draw him on the inside of the chapel, each one


tells a different lie. How many gods do you believe in?
How many good men? The story of the world can be told


in relation to umbrellas, invented in the seventh century
when we finally had enough rain. Don’t look at the gun


directly. And don’t remove the flute from its sheath of ice.
The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole


time, and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn.
Everyone I love is dancing in the plaza. A band plays below


the archway, we’re drinking wine and rolling up our sleeves
to show the soft parts of our arms. When this ends I hope


it ends completely. How brave I feel right now, watching
my old friends beside my father and imagining the end


as one imagines something certain, a birthday or a doctor’s
visit. Not like last year when we watched the movie about


ruins—I ignored the crusted amphitheater and wanted
to touch you. It was February. You wore a long blue coat.


Inheritance

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