2024 “(Not) In Love” Tanka Challenge First Place WINNER: “Physics Lesson: How a Girl Stores Power” by Diana Tokaji
It’s time to congratulate our First Place WINNER of Frontier Poetry‘s 2024 “(Not) In Love” Tanka Challenge, Diana Tokaji! Read the evocative, award-winning tanka “Physics Lesson: How a Girl Stores Power” below.
This tanka was chosen for first place for its raw vulnerability and the way it takes trauma and turns it into empowerment, all within the confines of this short form.
(Please note: this poem contains mention of sexual assault.)
Physics Lesson: How a Girl Stores Power
stares at the butterfly as
he rapes her again.
Fifty years later a snake
enters her home. She kills it.
Diana Tokaji
Diana Tokaji is a performance artist (London, SF, and Capital Fringe Festival award-winner) and the author of two award-winning books: the memoir, SIX WOMEN IN A CELL, (Best Indie Book Award/Nonfiction 2021); and the intimate resource book, SURVIVING ASSAULT – Words that Rock & Quiet & Tell the Truth, (Next Generation Indie Book finalist). In 2020 she won the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Prize judged by Richard Blanco for Split This Rock. She is published in The Quarry, Bellevue Literary Review, Tiferet, Author, The New Guard (2019 poetry finalist), Solstice Literary Magazine (2022 essay finalist), Bourgeon Literary, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and in parenting rags, humor anthologies, feminist presses, and a bus in Virginia that displays her 2023 winning poem. A certified yoga therapist, Diana specializes in supporting female survivors of assault and trauma. Forthcoming are her two collections: BOOK OF ESSAYS BEFORE I DIE; and SPOKE: Poems of Squid, Cellmates, Love.
