Why I can’t stop myself being in love with staying up so late

by Alison Armstrong-Webber
The Waters
First Place, September 2015
Judged by C. Wade Bentley


I can see in the straight-sided lawn laid out, late in the late night,
sprinklers freshening boxwood, the edged grounds bird-silent, nothing
in the sky that was not there a million years past, what so much life
might make for itself, that it gives up, lays down, like a small fortune.


So spare, yet still able to perfectly capture the pensiveness and disquiet of the late-night mind—a perspective, a world that most of us sleep through. --C. Wade Bentley