My good friend Chad Willenborg and I used to try to win the citypaper writing contest every year. Then they stopped having it for a while (no poetry, at least). Then they started it back up again and this year Chad, a fiction writer, persuaded me to send in some poems. We both won. We celebrated last Thursday at Dirty Frank's where we used to bitch about losing 8, 9, 10 years ago.
If you're in Philly, the 4/5 issue will be in newsboxes for a few more days. Or you can go read Willenborg's story, "Blackout" (an excerpt from his novel) here. You can find my poem on the citypaper site, too, but the formatting is messed up, so just scroll down this blog to Feb 11, boom, winner. Some nice chance overlap between the story and poem.
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PS - a facsimile of the paper. Click and flip to page 18:
Open publication - Free publishing