{image1}The competition was steep, but Joanne Staudacher and Kathryn Gahl won OnMilwaukee.com's Fourth Annual Milwaukee Poetry Contest.

Stuadacher, who lives in Oshkosh and is working on her dissertation at UWM, took first place for her poem "Lipstick on Concrete: A Downer Avenue Poem."

"It's funny how poems work," she says. "It's written about real events, and at the time it seemed like the really important events going on were the conflicts that lead up to my friend and I turning my body into a visible protest poem, and that's what I wanted to write about, but it was a tiny thing like a hole in my pocket and a stranger I never met that made me realize what this poem wanted to be about, regardless of my intentions."

Staudacher receives a $100 gift certificate to Schwartz Bookshops and an OnMilwaukee.com gift package for her winning piece.

Contest judge and local poet Sue Silvermarie says she found Staudacher's poem to be the best because "(it) stood out for its superb control of sound play and language nuances, its cohesiveness, its narrative thrill and originality, and its skillfully crafted ambiguities."

WUWM's Sea Statura and the OMC editorial staff also judged the contest.

Lipstick on Concrete: A Downer Avenue Poem

for EFW

That was the day I lost my lipstick to language.
It was the color I wore whenever I took on the world,
deeper than blood red, they called it "Can't Be Beet,"
a pun that rested like a slightly malevolent smile on my lips.

It was the color I wore the day you and I
wrote another poet's words on my skin.
In that cramped office, we transformed
my appearance first with micro-tip pens,
then with permanent marker when the oil

of my skin clogged the metal rollers.

We laid another identity over my own,
disguised me to expose me,
supported another with my darkened flesh--
whole poems, some phrases--
me writing upside down on my bare legs,
you inscribing my face and my chest

to the edge of my scandalous black plastic dress.

The last touch was the lipstick, thick like blood and deadly bright.
But it was early spring and still chilly,
and I put on that awful black button-up sweater,
slipped the tube of lipstick into my pocket,
and strode boldly with you to my car.

We were such a contrast, me bursting at my plastic seams,
long hair trailing in an angry cascade,
you, slim in your earthy colors,
your crop of curls an electric halo.
But we were both smiling.

What a stir we caused, stopping in each room,
my evangelical skin burning on everyone's lips.
When the party was over, we walked back to the car,
laughing, and I dropped you home before going there myself.
Sitting on my bed and stripping of my heels,
I noticed the holes in my pockets, the emptiness within.

Of course, it's silly to go back for a tube of lipstick,
but it was part of a larger symbol,bigger than itself.
We go back for the symbolic, no matter its real significance.

I retraced my steps, parked in the exact same place,
shone a flashlight on the ground.
No small black tube, but, suddenly, a deep red scrawl:
"Catalpa" with an exclamation point,
"Catalpa" and a tic tac toe grid
with three diagonal kisses going down, no O's.

I stood there in the dark with my beam on the concrete:
my lipstick, conquer-the-world lipstick,
traded for a word, a tree I still love the sound of.

In the daylight of the next morning,
I saw the tree was not all the sidewalk had to say.
Closer to Kenwood, the names "Carolyn + Jiff" scrawled like a promise.
A girl with a name like daylight and a boy thick and sweet as peanut butter.
I imagine them lying side by side in the grass and giggling like new found love.

In October I will marvel that their names are still there,
the bright grease lasting through rainstorms and summer sneakers.
But it can't last much longer.
Soon, the leaves will complete their descent
and grind their fire-hued particles against them,
begin to wear them down. Then will come the snow.
They will cling tenaciously for the first few weeks,
determined to make things stick, but the grinding of ice and salt
will eventually erase them from this blissful coexistence.

How unlike us--you, marvelous,
still with me after seeing me at my worst,
biting my knuckles behind the steering wheel and cursing,
yet we slept side by side like sisters and awoke in billowing light.

Yes, I lost my lipstick to language that day,
the same way I lost my own skin,
but since then in this dark season I have learned these things:
how to scrape myself from this cracking concrete,
how to scrub clean a second skin,
how to crawl back inside myself and glow with an edgy sweetness

--Joanna Staudacher

Kathryn Gahl, who worked as a register nurse for 25 years, currently lives in Two Rivers. Her poems and stories have appeared in more than 25 publications, and her poem "On Fire" is OMC's runner up.

"I wrote 'On Fire' just for the OnMilwaukee.com contest. My daughter Nora encouraged me to 'fire something off' for the contest," says Gahl, who receives a $40 gift certificate to both Trocadero and Barossa for her winning poem.

ON FIRE

It happened
on a May afternoon,
a white college kid

confused about whether he
was driving North or South on I-43, so he got off
on Capitol just as
the well-loved chair
in the back of his packed
station wagon took fire-wait

till the kid who hoisted
that overstuffed, frayed, beat-up,
(a red-tipped cigarette between
his teeth) hears about this one-how

men of color rushed from homes
to retrieve the chair, blast it with
a fire extinguisher, the smoke, smolder,
before a black-and-white handshake
clear that this Milwaukee was
not a place
not a time
but a flint, the spark of response,
a glimmer of harmony.