We are so pleased to announce that Charlie Peck has won the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award with his poetry collection World’s Largest Ball of Paint. Congratulations, Charlie!
Charlie Peck grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and received his MFA from Purdue University. His poetry has appeared previously in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and Best New Poets 2019, among others.
We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award and send further congratulations to the finalists and semi-finalists.
Selections from
World’s Largest Ball of Paint
A Small Sweetness
I have to guess that he’s dead by now,
the man who offered twenty dollars outside
Macon to bring him to the Florida border,
but before we punched Valdosta he clipped out
clutching only a coffee tin and a pair of slippers.
In the rearview he marched lop-legged against
the rain, and that’s it. In the long alphabets
of memory there are no clean-cut ends,
just the fat bits we bite when parts truck
violently back: gasoline fumes in a toilet stall,
every hot crotch of summer ’07, the pair of red
canvas shoes I wore daily as my arm dipped
in and out of a loud oven in the brick back
of a restaurant whose name is long gone,
but the key sleeps still in my glovebox.
When I was a boy I thought my father spoke
with an accent, stumbling through those mid-day
liquor-loops. Sex with you, one woman said
to me as each foot slipped back into snow boots,
feels like charity. It is good some mornings
to feel tired, pressed between two breasts
as a small voice reads the paper, the day too cold
to consider, lazy garlic wandering the house.
It must help that at the core of hurt hides
some small sweetness, that when a chef burned
his hands working the grill, he told me to cook
him up a shot. So I wrapped the cord, sucked
the spoon, and dropped the plunger deep
into the red flowerbed spreading in his arm.
His drooped eyes were not mine so I felt no hate.
Once in high school my brother caught me
bed-bound with a girl, so she and I left, skipped
the six blocks to her house to meet the garage door
open, her father purpled and swollen,
swinging from rafters, a bloated windchime.
I think that rope must have been tight
as a belt you can’t unclasp fast enough
in a heated hotel room to pull yourself out
and be consumed by a wet, wanting mouth.
I hated animals and knew it meant I was heartless.
I was quick with a chef’s knife so people called me
romantic. But it’s not a butcher’s red pool
that guts me — it’s the sister, who headphoned
and high lay on her bed as her dad swung,
a metronome under muted floorboards.
Noise
I once attended a stand-up show in Amsterdam,
and not speaking a word of Dutch I just laughed
along with the crowd, letting myself get caught
up with the noise. It’s the logic of applause
and food fights. I can’t think about the bubonic
plague without getting anxious. When I watch
Planet Earth, I root for both prey and predator.
The border between humor and disgust blurs
neatly so it’s often hard to say. I was driving
home from the grocery store last week
and saw that my neighbor had painted and hung
a new sign on his shed: THEEVES WILL BE SHOT
and Kate asked, Who’s Theeves? In high school
a boy did a Gallagher impression after prom,
smashing watermelons on stage with a hammer,
his fake mustache falling off mid-swing,
and then two weeks later his parents received a bill
for $30,000 to replace the pulp-smattered curtain.
Or that time in second grade after we had
just moved when a quiet boy in my class asked
for a ride home. My mother, new to the city,
got lost, and cross-stitched neighborhoods
in the fading light because the boy didn’t know
which was his, and he started crying, and my mother
started to cry too, and we drove until the boy saw
a familiar park, and eventually we found it,
his house, and his mother was on the lawn
with two officers, and she’s crying, too,
and then the drive home after, my mother
whispering Shit, Shit, Shit, and wiping her eyes.
Leaving Lafayette
And I’ll bet for a nickel that behind
Menard’s I could still find our pond
where the long grass is matted flat.
How we used to go sit with fishing gear
and cold beers those June mornings.
Over at the brewery where the car
died, we just stayed until closing,
eating bar pretzels and watching folks
speed down 9th on their way home.
That studio apartment where I first lived,
remember it? You found it charming
how the sink and shower ran at the same
time, even just trying to wet a toothbrush
or rinse blood from a hangnail’s mess.
That Saturday we drove a half hour
to Delphi just to see the robot opera,
those costumes of aluminum foil tubing
and spray-painted jeans, we laughed
so hard in the theatre the flashlight
came on. That one actor knew none
of his lines and couldn’t dance worth a damn,
but god we loved that show. Arm in arm
afterwards we wanted to go for a drink,
but every shop window had posters
for the two girls who disappeared
by the river, ten grand reward
for finding the man responsible.
Look, if you have to go to New Zealand,
just go. I can stick around here a while
longer, with the wood steps I slept on the night
my key broke in its lock. Long painted
brick walls we stood against in the rain
trying to get cigarettes lit. I could gather
every last bit of it just to prove a point:
none of this will change unless
you stay. Just look at that truck
with antlers on the grille, the dust
it kicks up as it spins out of the lot.
Overhead, clouds drift and separate,
like shelves of ice that break
from shore to float downriver.