2016 Poetry: Imagine, Write & Win First Place (High School) 4 A.M. by Cate Yuk

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Rosa Gregory
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1 2016 Poetry: Imagine, Write & Win First Place (High School) 4 A.M. by Cate Yuk They always ask, they always say Why choose to disregard the day? When sunshine peaks and flowers rise, Why wait for duller, grayer skies? Why lose the minutes most men rest? No nightmares, no impossible tests, No princess to save in an ivory tower, Nothing to push the crucial hours? But to them I turn, to them I say, Without the dawn, there is no day. Why forego the new and waste your eyes Seeing old shades in simply blue skies? Why miss the first cracks of the oranges and golds Burning their ways through the darkened folds Of previous night s silvery cloak, The great expanse of cerulean smoke? Why miss the very first chirping bird When all is near silent, nowhere a word To stifle the songs of the old wind chimes Long forgotten over noise and time? So then I say to them, I must conclude, Though you say my sleeping pattern s skewed When all is here and yours to keep Why do you still choose to sleep?

2 Second Place (High School) Social Media Sucks by Jacob Carpentier We have a serious selfie situation on our hands I see kids snapping self-portraits with slight asymmetric smiles Selfie sticks stretched straight out Stressing over silly angles Strategic selfie spots Sneaky light settings All to secure the single-best picture To show solely out best side To cancel out the shady aspects we try so stinking hard to hide Searching desperately for the secret to social-security And that s why social media sucks Because when people post their pictures, people pray that people like them So when I peruse the piles of recent posts, I see boys proudly flexing their pecs in their pictures Like they re popping Popeye s spinach Instead of pounds of Popeye s popcorn chicken And I see girls painfully posing pretty princesses Perched upon perfectly planned landscapes Praying that people preach compliments Playing with the Perpetual Instagram filter for the perfect pic to post Cropping, painting, chopping, pasting, precisely Photoshopping And I m guilty of it too When I post I often ponder if I m posting for me Or posting for you So please ask yourself Do your pictures properly portray your personality? Or are your pictures posing as a parallel reality? Cuz I propose that if you peer into the purpose of your posts You ll perceive that the applause is the piece that pleases you the most But I can t complain about my classmates Cuz I also carefully contemplate the connotation of my captions Considering every contextual choice Every conceivable corny one-liner Carelessly covering up my true voice And once I can convince myself to cautiously click post I can t quit refreshing Continuously counting the increasing likes Caring more about the complimentary comments Than my pictures creative contents Classifying my classmates by the quantity of careless followers Cuz somehow, that s considered important And I can t comprehend how this quantity correlates to coolness But the coolest and the cutest always captivates us cuz we re clueless

3 We fail to find that followers don t reflect our true worth Instead, we focus on finding Facebook friends To inflate our Facebook followers To finally reach 55 likes On our favorite Facebook profile pictures To finally feel accepted By our phony Facebook friends And we flock to these fake people The few who flaunt flawless profiles Falsely advertising their fabricated and forged identities But suffering from the same problems as the rest of us And yet we wonder why we want the world to witness only our smiling side We wonder why we want to show the world our little white-lies While we wait for our wondrous amounts of likes we must look inside On whether what we really care for is what we post online

4 Third Place (High School) It s one of those nights by Megan Schoeleb It s one of those nights Where you feel anything could happen You know it As you walk down the street Between the trees and lights Stars Only fractions of The ones that shone above The peoples of old The countries of old Flickering light Suns that might hold worlds Drawn into pictures of heros and monsters Singing their stories In a celestial song You close your eyes The wind Carries with it the scent of baked earth A piece of summer still surviving The heat of the day Riding the air of the night But the chill of the north shares the breeze The first leaves of autumn scrape the pavement Touching just slightly as they dance The beginning of the harvest Tasted Felt The sound Trees Moaning Rustling With every shift of air The leaves move with the gale They flow as water Carrying a great ship Through the night Above the lonely barks of dogs Chirps of cicadas Violins of crickets Your own footsteps

5 Shadows Grow and shrink As if in the presence of a great fire That cannot be seen Patches of light From house From street From stars Make the dark not so hostile But the hidden places watch you Curious It could be dangerous But you know it might be worth it Adventure Beckons in the shadows A dragon call carried on the wind A silhouette against the stars Small laughter From behind a tree That creaks like the ship above it Coasting on the flowing leaves Sirens sing Or perhaps the stars Running Exhilarated Wings on your heels Until a darkened figure appears Slower Slower But you can t stop You think it s moving away Until streetlights reveal its proximity Closer Closer Adventures beckons from the shadows It could be dangerous But you know it might be worth it Your own footsteps Echoing through the night The chill of the north Sharpening the breeze Suns Singing their stories In a celestial song It s one of those nights Where you feel anything could happen You know it As you walk down the street Between the tree and lights

Bismarck, North Dakota is known for several things. First of all, you probably already know that Bismarck is the state capitol. You might even know

1 Bismarck, North Dakota is known for several things. First of all, you probably already know that Bismarck is the state capitol. You might even know that Bismarck is the home of the Dakota Zoo, which