KATHERINE INDERMAUR: 2008 Student Poet Laureate Winner

Katherine Indermaur impressed both John York, my preliminary reader, and me with "Downtown After Dark", submitted by her teacher Priscilla Chappell at Enloe High School in Raleigh last spring. We were delighted to name her our Student Poet Laureate Award winner in the inaugural contest sponsored by the North Carolina English Teachers Association. We are hoping to receive poems as fine as this one by our April 15 deadline. (See details for the NCETA submission process on the sidebar.) In the next two days I will be posting poems by Honorable Mention and Special Commendation winners, Anuja Acharya and Sarah Bruce.

As you can see from the following biography, Katherine is fascinated by many things. Including Starbucks! She continues to write now that she is a student at UNC; one of her new poems follows her prize-winning poem.



Katherine Indermaur has lived the majority of her life in Raleigh, NC
with three brothers, two sisters, a dog, a cat, and several fish.
Though this household wasn't exactly conducive to writing, it certainly
helped with inspiration. She graduated from Enloe High School, where
she was inspired and enlightened by Ms. Chappell's "Poetic Voices"
elective - twice. She now attends UNC-Chapel Hill. In her free time,
she enjoys playing piano, rock-climbing, writing, and taking trips to
Starbucks. Some of her favorite poets are Vassar Miller, Pablo Neruda,
Michael Chitwood, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. She hopes
to major in English with a double-minor in Creative Writing and Music.

Downtown After Dark

Hairspray, beer, hot plastic:
Fabric makes sounds against our legs,
rhythmic and steady like our pulses.
We fall silent, listening to their laughter.
The city slips into an easy slumber,
a November night hibernation.
Paper bag tumbleweeds scratch the asphalt,
the soles of our shoes in close procession.

All is not well, you seem to say with
fidgeting fingers, fumbling with car keys, metal.
There is a fire escape up above,
romantic in all its rusted red charm,
a slinking tomcat, a glowing exit sign, backwards E.
You refuse to break the heated silence,
mist through our nostrils and empty mouths.

We are airy tonight, which makes us dark
like the coffee I drank, so bitter
you hesitated in kissing me. But you gave in;
you always do. You will speak, I think.

Listen, you say, to those people, (Ha!)
incredulous, your shoulders shimmying in laughter.
I open my ears, tense,
waiting for some hint to their vibrancy
even in the dead of the night, but you
have already unlocked the car - a handle offensively cold against thin
fingers.

Those silhouettes in a lighted window,
glasses clinking and voices rising melodiously,
speak louder to me than your silence.
I release the cold of the metal,
take one step, and recoil into the passenger seat,
away from the night's display, hard leather
consciously beneath my thighs. The sky
is like a bruise, purples and blues,
ink - and the car soon has its own mist,
speech, speeding us off into the muted senses.



(Katherine with her mother at the Awards Luncheon in Winston-Salem last fall.)

----------------------

Lot's Wife

You do not even know my name
But I smelled the fire and brimstone.
I turned back and saw the flames.

Lot took my body and my home,
Salt and ashes. Here I cringe - I am no more than my own tombstone.

Perhaps in my heart some string did twinge
As I looked upon the dying flight
Of souls on whose sin my fate did hinge.

I can't remember much but the sight
Of ashes flitting like moths and steel
Splitting the singe of Lot's prophesied light.

Before his god my blood congeals
In smoky aftermath, at last, alone - A statue with enough salt to heal
Anyone's wounds but my own.



Katherine Indermaur
UNC '12