The DC Center is pleased to announce the winner of the $75 second place prize for the 2011 Smokin' Words Poetry Competition: Richard Tayson!

Richard Tayson is the author of The World Underneath and The Apprentice of Fever, and the co-author of the memoir Look Up for Yes. Tayson's awards include the Wick Poetry Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Prairie Schooner's Edward Stanley Award, and a Pushcart Prize. A doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center in New York City, Tayson is now writing a dissertation on William Blake's influence on punk singer Patti Smith.

Richard's winning poem, "What Stops Me Sometimes Doctor," was published by the Kent State University Press in The Apprentice of Fever. It is reprinted below by permission of the author.

What Stops Me Sometimes Doctor

What stops me sometimes Doctor
is a puff
a toke
an open me up and take me
down and dirty now stone
in my blood. What stops me

is one of my four
voices the one with that
beautiful-by-ugly-by-beautiful
face attached my mother
what stops me

is her seven-til-thirteen-year-old
thighs spread
open by her stepfather's
hands the way he'd
skin the lid off a can of peanuts

and sometimes Doctor a man's fingers
in my mouth is her mouth
is what happened next
and why not my mouth
lived safely in her body nine months
is what happened next
and made her eat two pounds of chocolate
every afternoon made her

silent all my life
made her want to be ugly so no one would
look at her and what makes me

want seed
want no tree
want speed
want no car
want smoke
want no sky
want sight
want no eyes
want you

to put it in put it
in I say stay out put it
in don't speak it's our

secret Mother we can't
go forward because of the light
he swallowed from your split
womb so now the
light up take these snort this have a sip buy you a drink kid
doesn't that make you feel a whole lot better?

thing that goes through me in that fatherly
voice says Doctor
from the inside out
I'm nothing but
junk.

Thank you to all who entered the competition! Brought to you by The DC Center and Split This Rock.