Elise Corso – Third Prize
Elise is sixteen years old (almost seventeen!) and going into her senior year of high school. She writes poems and short stories for fun and has no literary training besides AP English classes and one year of creative writing. Elise also enjoys participating in her school’s Drama club, has taken a Dramatic Arts class, and looks forward to Play Production this year.
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The human imagination is limitless.
It can never be fully expressed,
unless by an adventuring, grass-stained, and scuffed-up child,
or those adults who lose themselves to its infinite possibilities
and are lucky enough to find themselves in a cell of padded walls
or unfortunate enough to be stuck in a beaten down apartment
in front of a nine dollar type writer, trying to make a living
as the deafening “click, click, click, BING! fwush” flaws their thought process.
Ideas.
The cliched light bulb is not nearly bright enough
to express the luminescence of a new found, genius idea.
The glowing glass of a lit bulb can never show the depth of an idea.
Even the egg yolk sun is not enough to convey how an idea
can fill one’s entire being and become who one is and what one is about.
Imagination. Ideas Creativity!
All are like chasing an unreachable horizon
to witness a never-ending golden sunrise
that drenches the skin with warmth
and saturates the very core of the soul and mind
with dazzling inspirations
like a bottomless, mossy well
whose dirty, brown water flecked with dead leaves
is boiled pure by the heat of the earth’s molten center.
Refining and shaping the unfound gold
that lies hidden in the mines of one’s mind.
