ROUND ONE: 7-mulligan vs. 10-organs

^{[click image to view matchup in full screen in a new window.]}

The Poets’ Challenge: Each poet is assigned a single word based on their bracket seed, ranging from 1 (intuitive) to 16 (seemingly impossible). Poets must write a kid-appropriate poem using the prompted word in under 36 hours. Once both final poems have been received, they will be pasted into the body of this post, and then the reader poll will be open for voting.

Voter Instructions: Read each poem as many times as you’d like. Then use the poll to express your preference. Votes are counted in real time and cannot be changed once entered. As a guideline for voting, consider the criteria on which the contestants on the cooking show “Chopped” are evaluated: presentation, taste, and creativity. Translated roughly into poetry terms, presentation might include technical aspects such as meter, rhyme, form/shape, etc.; taste might be the net effect — did the poem move you to laugh, cry, think, kill, etc.; and creativity might include the poet’s approach toward a certain subject, image evocation, clever wordplay, etc.

“This is awesome, where can I find more?”: All results and scheduled matchups, including a glance at the round-by-round writing windows and voting windows, are visible from the Live Scoreboard page. In addition, results will be tweeted from @edecaria as they become final.

Here are the poems:

7-mulligan
Jump Rope Stew
by Julie Larios

One, two, double-dutch stew,
cook up a kettle of skip-a-rope stew,
mulligatawny and mulligan, too,
chicken cocido and beef ragout.
Into the broth goes this and that,
spuds and turnips and bacon fat,
dumplings to the dog, carrots to the cat,
and peas to the lady with the porkpie hat.

vs.

10-organs
I Hate Vegetables
by Ann Jacobus

Dad commanded we must eat our beets (heart beets!)
Like chopped organs the bits seemed to pulsate.
Dad’s attention then on TV athletes,
At my brother I lobbed a bite, airfreight.
 
Splat on his shirt like a bloodstain! Bulls eye! 
A roar and he pounced with lion power.
Pummeled me mashed-up as chow-mein, whereby
My ears are now both cauliflower.

VOTE NOW!

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