Editors' Note: We're pleased to present as a special feature this week a poem by Jennifer Perrine, of Des Moines, IA, the winner of the “Taste ‘Test” contest. In addition to this online presentation, her poem “If Life Gives You Lemons, Make” will be made into a limited-edition letterpress broadside by VABC artists. The contest called for poems dealing with taste.

Finalists were Sandra Storey (Jamaica Plain, MA) for “Blend”; Kathleen Winter (Tempe, AZ) for “Cambridge Elementary”; and Miriam Levine (Arlington, MA) for “Alpine Strawberries in November.”

Selections for the annual contest on a rotating theme are made for high literary quality and suitability for visual interpretation. Information on next year’s contest will appear March 1-June 1 on the virginiabookarts.org website.

The broadside from last year’s contest winner “L,O,V,E, and the Other Twenty-Two” by Jeanette Marie Sayers is available now online.

If Life Gives You Lemons, Make

your mouth into a trough, a spout
from which that sour sauce will pour,
pulp and spittle swimming down your
chin, eyes pinched shut, each acid thought

welling under the tongue. Thin slice
of pain wedged on the salty rim
of your face, let its tart grace skim
your glass neat: no sugar, no ice

to temper this bite, this slick burst
that cankers your lips. Life gives you
lemons: cut your teeth on their rinds,

tear them with gusto, slake your thirst
with their slavering, jaundiced juice,
swallow hard, leave no seeds behind.

JENNIFER PERRINE
About the Poet

Taste 'Test Contest
Virginia Arts of the Book Center
A program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities