The English Channel The English Channel Volume 17 Issue 2 Spring 2017 | Page 18

Contests
OU Cinema Studies Screenplay Competition
Feature Length
First Place: Lawson Robinson, “A Tale of Two Brothers”
Short Screenplay
First Place (equal first): Nicole Diroff, “Utility”
First Place (equal first): Brandy Perry, “The Melancholy of
Henry La More”
Honorable Mention: Jillian Endsley, “Sabotage”
unfinished business
for Degas
First-Place
Entry
in the
Ekphrasis Poetry Contest
(by Jennifer DeBellis )
She’s an ordinary gal with wondrous curves—
The image of every woman, any woman
you likely pass on the street each morning
or kiss hello as you pour your first coffee.
She’s someone’s daughter, sister, mother
friend. Maybe you’ve agreed to be just friends.
But the arc of her bare back and stroke
of the brush paring hair she’s raised
Inspired by Edgar Degas’s Seated Nude
Woman Brushing Her Hair, 1885/1908,
DIA
overhead say she’s more, more than average,
more, perhaps, than you bargained for
when you began to sketch her performing this
act for you like she has so many times before.
The lines on this page tell a story
of unfinished business, of things left open.
Lover, stranger, wife: what does it matter
when the lights are dimmed in this little room
and the rush of rosewater overwhelms you
till the charcoal you held a moment ago
sits on the unfinished page, your hand
now occupied with pressing the stray hairs
from her neck, with tracing her arched back?
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