Third Place – 2020 Beverly Hopkins Contest for High School Students

“Amina Aser is a poet of the image and of how proper attention to it, how the exact drawing of it, can lead to a kind of subtlety that would break any reader’s heart.  This poem shows how the internal world of the mind and the external world of daily experience intermingle, unite.”

Jericho Brown, 2020 Hopkins Contest Judge

My Lost Art Project

by AMINA ASER
Parkway West High School

‘Round a shaggy carpet
Years back with a little pattern and the
Little towns on it
I was in a room
And I made my home in there

Tan apartment buildings where
A man sold candy and
A boy chucked a nice pinecone at me and
My shower window had a pretty blue hue

Rose bushes outside and a couple nice trees
Cigarettes in the street and the music
Blasted while I slept

It wasn’t a home to me, like
A house house and
They still had us take milk cartons and
I took two
Put nice little pink-tan-like paper on the outside
And the brown roofs
And the little number of my apartment building

I put the pretty rose bushes and
The tree and
Put all that on a nice green piece of paper

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