winner of the 2021 philip booth poetry prize

I have named the pitcher plants
Lil Jugs, Big Naturals, and Juicy Caboosey.
I like to see them dangling, those
carnal cups both pendulous and gaping,
sunbeamed so the veins bulge in their throats.
The pitchers drool when they are happy,
oozing sugar syrup from their pores
to which I say: girl, same. I am no longer at war
with the ants that rally their colonial regiments
up my bookshelf directly into the puckers
of Juicy Caboosey’s rigid lips. She reddens,
ridged with her pleasures, her glut betrayed
by the dim shadows of still twitching bodies
collected in the morgue sac. Macabre – but the plants
will make this neglected investment property a home. I keep
my apartment humid, claustrophobic air obliterating all
distinction between indrawn and outward breath. My love language
is acts of service. I water the sphagnum moss at their roots
and catch the plants more complex nourishment. I learn
to move without stirring the unventilated atmosphere
to catch flies against the windows, pressing their pale gold guts
into mildew gilded rivulets of condensation. As the pitchers grow
engorged with vitamins I seek out larger prey. Lure
mice from their nests between the studs, then trap the merry rats
that flit in the bowels of the communal rubbish skip.
The body corporate holds a special general meeting
to account for the disappearances of residents’ cats. I perch
by the complimentary refreshments, conditioned air
too dry on my skin, my absent landlord’s vote an affirmation
to install cameras at the building’s entrances. No matter, I only need
to keep the pitchers fed until his next inspection, when he will learn
headfirst how to add value for good, if only as fertilizer. If the pitchers
are not yet large enough, I have looked up where to saw the joints.

Rebecca Hawkes grew up on a sheep and beef farm near Methven, New Zealand, and now lives in Wellington where she works, paints, and writes. Her debut collection Meat Lovers is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2022... along with No Other Place To Stand, an anthology of climate change poetry co-edited with Essa Ranapiri, Erik Kennedy, and Jordan Hamel. Rebecca edits the online journal Sweet Mammalian with Nikki-Lee Birdsey. Her first chapbook ‘Softcore Coldsores’ was published in AUP New Poets 5. You can find her poetry propagated throughout various journals in Aotearoa and abroad, from Starling to Stasis, and at her vanity mirror www.rebeccahawkesart.com.

Dylan Lewis (untitled, b/w negative) is a photographer, writer and visual artist based in Richmond, Virginia. Navigating the relationship between image, language and narrative, his work constructs a space where the ontological unease of “documentary” photography, the aestheticizing eye of fiction and the emotional texture of dreams within an always-already fractured reality intertwine.

This poem was originally published in Salt Hill 46.