The Contest I Lost by One Vote
Second place taught me more than the trophy ever could have.
I lost the Harwood Library Poetry Prize by one vote, and the vote was mine. It took me three days to work that out, and when I did, I sat down on my kitchen floor and laughed until my neighbor knocked on the wall.
Let me back up.
The Harwood branch library runs a poetry contest every spring. It is not glamorous. The prize is fifty dollars, a certificate printed on the librarian’s home printer, and your poem displayed by the checkout desk for a month in a plastic sleeve. But it was the first contest I ever wanted to win, wanted with the embarrassing hunger you only admit to years later. I was twenty-six. I had been writing seriously for two years, which is exactly long enough to be dangerous to yourself.
The rules were charmingly small-town. Twelve finalists read aloud on a Thursday evening. The audience votes on paper ballots, folded once, dropped in an old biscuit tin. Everyone votes, including the finalists, and the only rule was written in Mrs. Okafor’s careful librarian hand at the top of the ballot: Vote for the poem, not the person.
I had spent six weeks polishing my entry. It was called “Migration Patterns” and it was, I believed, sophisticated. It had form. It had an extended metaphor about geese that I had researched. Actual research... for geese. Every line had been sanded until it could not snag on anything, which I thought was the point, and which I now understand was the entire problem.
Reading order was drawn from a hat. I went fourth and it went well. People nodded in the places designed for nodding. My friend Dev gave me a thumbs up from the second row. I sat down buzzing, already composing my modest acceptance face.
Then, eleventh, an old woman named Ruth Kessler shuffled up to the front. She did not have a printout. She had an index card, and she held it at arm’s length like it might bite her.
Her poem was nine lines long. It was about her husband’s chair.
Walter had died in November, and the poem was about the armchair by the front window where he had sat every afternoon for forty-one years doing the crossword and watching the street. She described the seat cushion that still held his shape, the flattened place that would not rise.
She said she could not sit in it and could not move it and could not stop setting his coffee down beside it, one cup, every morning, going cold by the window. The last line was about the sun crossing the empty chair each afternoon, right on schedule, like it had not heard.
Nine lines. No metaphor anywhere. Nothing sanded, nothing sophisticated. The room did not applaud right away... because half of it was crying, and you cannot clap and wipe your face at the same time.
Then the ballots. I sat with my folded slip and Mrs. Okafor’s handwriting looking up at me. Vote for the poem, not the person.
I want you to understand that I tried to talk myself into my own name. I made arguments. Craft. Structure. Six weeks of work against nine lines on an index card. The geese, for God’s sake... I had researched the geese.
Then I thought about which poem I would remember in ten years, and I wrote “Ruth Kessler,” folded the ballot once, and dropped it in the biscuit tin.
Final tally, read aloud by Mrs. Okafor while adjusting her glasses: Ruth Kessler, nineteen. Me... eighteen.
One vote.
I lost by a single vote, and the vote was mine, and it is the only ballot I have ever cast that I would not take back for anything.
The three days it took me to do that arithmetic were not pretty. I drove home telling myself second place was respectable. By midnight I was replaying my performance for flaws. By the next evening I had a full conspiracy involving Ruth’s bridge club packing the audience. Grief makes fools of us, and so, it turns out, does mild disappointment.
Then, on day three, standing in my kitchen, the math arrived uninvited. Nineteen to eighteen. If I had voted for myself... it would have been a tie.
I had not lost to Ruth Kessler. I had lost to my own honest opinion, delivered anonymously, folded once.
That was the moment on the kitchen floor. Because you cannot argue with that verdict. It was not a judge with strange taste or an audience that did not get me. It was me, given one folded slip of paper and total privacy, telling the truth: the nine lines about the chair were better than my six weeks of geese.
The question that mattered arrived right behind it. Why?
I read “Migration Patterns” again with new eyes and saw it clearly for the first time: a poem with a perfect exterior and no one home.
I had written it to be admired. Ruth had written hers because she could not sit in a chair. Every choice I had made was defensive, designed so that no one could catch me feeling anything too nakedly. She had stood in front of forty neighbors and set down a cup of coffee that no one would drink. Much later I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I recognized my geese in every paragraph. I had built a beautiful fence around nothing.
So I started over, in a specific way. I made a rule: every poem had to cost me something to write, one true thing I would rather not put down. The first thing I wrote under the new rule was about my grandfather’s workshop, the smell of machine oil and pencil shavings, the way memory keeps a room dusted long after the house is sold. It was rougher than anything I had written in two years. It was also the first poem of mine that ever made a stranger write to me.
I kept entering contests, but differently. When I sent work to a monthly poetry contest the following year, I sent the poem that scared me, not the one I could defend in an argument. It placed. The geese never placed anywhere, and they are welcome to their retirement.
Ruth and I became friends, in the slow way of people who see each other at a library. Her poem hung by the checkout desk in its plastic sleeve through April, and I watched people stop for it, read it twice, and touch the counter for a second before moving on. In May she brought me a coffee and asked, with the bluntness of a woman who has outlived her patience for small talk, whether I had voted for her. I said yes. She nodded and said, “Good. I voted for you. I liked your geese.”
So there it is. We had each lost ourselves the contest, one folded ballot at a time, and neither of us regretted it, which might be the only kind of losing worth writing about.
Ruth died two winters later. Her niece told me they could not bring themselves to sell the armchair, so it went to her house, by a window, where the sun crosses it every afternoon, right on schedule.
I still have my certificate. Second place, home printer, slightly crooked. It hangs above my desk, and people assume it is there to motivate me, some story about redemption and working harder.
It is not. It hangs there to remind me of the ballot.
Vote for the poem. Then go home and become the person who could have written it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.