Michael Lottner, BA (Eng. & creative writing) 18, was the recipient of the 2018 poetry award.
He writes: “I live in Calais and work at a quince orchard. In my spare time I race horses. I still write avidly.”
Poetry: Interior with Congenital Hearing Loss
Irving Layton Award For Creative Writing: Poetry
Concordia’s Department of English confers prizes for excellence in the studies of English literature and creative writing.
The Irving Layton Awards for Creative Writing, worth $500 each, are presented to undergraduate students for works of poetry and fiction. To qualify for the poetry award, students must submit one or several poems.
Interior with Congenital Hearing Loss
by Michael Lottner
Let me begin with a few elementary gnostic points.
You are right to be skeptical of the sound
that beams through sleep. Mint is scrunched between crushed
ice and your glass. You are the backbone who presides
over your politics of incompletion.
And now you’ve done it. But it is not enough
to fade into air like pollen. Know what I am jealous of?
A spell cast with correct intonation.
Like your sentence. Like your motto. Like the efficacy
of God’s isolation in a crowded room.
There is a long history to why enormous rainfalls
are not the weather I requested. After surgery I was given
a crescent bowl for vomit. An orange popsicle.
You are charged with diffusing the long history.
Use the long history to uncover what hearing means to me.
As though my voice is the hearing I supposedly lost.
And, cupping hand over helix,
or wearing hearing aids, likeness looms up
with an ogre’s appetite. I do not think this is true.
Truth is, the concert was terrific. But I could only pretend.
You have been so patient. Here is your reward.
There is no loss because there is no sound.
There is no wallpaper because there are no walls.