Winner of the 2025 Summer Poetry Craft Prize
Thoughts on Stargazing While Viewing Starry Night Over the Rhône
Shauri Cherie
This Big Dipper isn’t the familiar freckles of opal
your dad introduced you to one late summer
night, sprawled on the lawn, your grandma’s quilt
cushioning you both from the grass. On the porch,
your mom had watched over you, bundled in her own blanket.
Dad had lifted an arm, coaxing you with soft words
to follow his finger along the curve of the Big Dipper’s
ladle dipping down toward the tree line, shining bold
amongst her fellow stars. She is in rural Utah with your father,
keeping him company until your flight back home.
Here, in the Musée d'Orsay a continent away from bliss-black
Utah nights, no longer hung from the heavens but canvas-preserved,
the curve of her handle has become an artist’s too-perfect arc,
starry glints captured as topaz set in azurite brush strokes, hovering
over river ripples you had crossed just that morning.
This Big Dipper holds you in stagnant resolve, unknowing,
treating you not like an old family friend but as every other
traveler or tourist disappointed they’ve stumbled upon her.
She is used to being skimmed over: she is not her sister,
Starry Night, nor is she van Gogh’s Self-Portrait just across the room.
As you admire her, mapping the curve of her handle in the air,
she begins to warm up to your presence, and for a moment,
you wonder if Dad had stared out at your Big Dipper
the night before. You’ll ask when you return home.
Shauri Cherie occasionally writes poetry and nonfiction when she isn't within the literary femurs and ulnas of Exposed Bone. She is easily excited by travel, curry, and stingrays, and she's surprisingly feral at concerts. Her work can be found in Trace Fossils Review, Midnight Chem, Nova Literary-Arts Magazine and elsewhere.
Analysis by Colleen Salisbury, Donald Pasmore, and Ben Cooper
This phenomenal poem by Shauri Cherie was selected for our Poetry Craft Prize based on its strong use of line breaks that create complex poetic meaning and for its use of tercets as a formal technique to establish tone. The skillful use of line breaks allows the reader to indulge in the “what else could be” feeling this piece presents to its audience. These breaks take the already-powerful images and turns them into something the reader can feel on a more complicated emotional level. When both the line and sentence can mean separate from one another, the audience must necessarily contend with the impact of both possible interpretations, thereby adding to the nuance and impact of the work. In this way, poetry becomes a game of “and” not “or”—a constant process of additive meaning.
One example of this is found in the third line of the first stanza: “night, sprawled on the lawn, your grandma’s quilt.” On a literal level—with the context of the other lines—this is a basic description of our scene: we are sprawled on the lawn at night with our grandmother’s quilt. However, with the line breaks, we are made to interpret the night sprawled alongside us on the lawn which could, itself, be representative of the grandmother’s quilt. Through this break, the night becomes a patchwork just like the quilt—the stars and planets making up the intricate tapestry. This also develops a connection between heritage, inheritance and the night sky. The grandmother could be passing the sky down to us as a gift, or, on the other hand, the grandmother could have passed on, leaving us to think of her as part of our inherited night sky, with her memory sitting just beyond our reach. These various interpretations, however, develop only through Cherie’s masterful use of line break.
Another craft choice we loved was the thoughtful use of stanza structure. The poem’s tercets create an unsettling feeling in the reader, even though the images in this piece appear comforting and domestic. Tercets inherently make us feel unbalanced given their brevity and lack of symmetry, and this creates an interesting juxtaposition within the piece. The discomfort we feel from the tercets is further built upon given that tercets also make the reader feel as if they don’t have enough information. This lack of information causes us to wonder, “what more does the poet want to tell us?” and this, once again, further expands the emotional complexity of the poem. By the end of the work, Cherie takes her craft one step further, connecting the audience to the poetic voice by calling “you” to wonder, “you” to ask, and “you” to return home, thereby establishing an openness between us, the poetic voice, and the stars themselves.