We’re pleased to announce the winner of the May WWWC: Mike Ladd. Mike’s poetic entry, ‘A funny thing happened the other day at the Amusement Park’, is funny, arresting and a little surreal, while also being one of the shortest winning entries!
Read his winning poem in full below.
A funny thing happened the other day at the Amusement Park
The rollercoaster got emotional –
it was so over the screaming kids,
the racket of pinion and chain dog.
It felt used and twisted, even spewed on.
It reared up and broke free
with an enormous industrial clanking,
shambling on girder legs toward the sea
where it sat down by the shore
quietly staring at the haze,
the awful truth of the distant city,
thinking to itself, ‘they will come for me
but they will never get me back.’
This is Mike’s second win in the WWWC – his first was back in 2022, when he and fellow poet Valerie Volk were jointly awarded for their poetic responses to the prompt ‘glimmer of light’. Read their poems here.
Mike is a writer and broadcaster, whose most recent book is Dream Tetras, a collaboration between Mike and artist Cathy Brooks. It combines experimental essays by Mike – inspired by snippets of dreams – with extraordinary images created by Cathy in response to these snippets.
Late last year, Mike and Cathy shared their missing Dream Tetra with us, written after the book was released. Read more about that here.
Love it. Love the mental image of it sitting on the shore with brows drawn down, thinking those thoughts. Love the vocabulary, words we don’t often read in literature and so full of their own heavy sound.