IBPC Winning Poems, 2008, Congratulations Poets! Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for January 2008
Judge Fleda Brown
Congratulations!

First Place

The Bottle Tree
by Allen M. Weber
Desert Moon Review

I was so proud, Mama, to get that robe, to help
fashion a cross with Hale County's finest men.
They let me have two swigs of shine and load up
Papa's shotgun.

That boy was kneeling on the hard-swept floor
below a char-drawn likeness of Jesus.
In a rightful fury, his ma'am fought like three
big men; her sorrow bit like a sour bile
into the roof of my mouth.

We dragged him to their bottle tree, and Mama,
those bottles made a sucking sound and poured out
colored moonlight at our feet. We staggered about
grinning like fear

as someone shot the barking dog, cackled when another
tore down the damp unmentionables that fluttered
on a single taut line.

As the rope was drawn around a limb, too near
a hollowed gourd with purple martin eggs,
I raised my hood to throw up supper on my boots,
then helped to paint a home with kerosene
and fire.

Since then my children raised up children, who play
with brown-skinned ones; and those who'd force it otherwise
are mostly hair and bones.

But southernmost branches caught the flames that night;
their splintered wounds still bleed. The heat-shocked
glass still takes my breath, to howl for reckoning. So

the animals keep wary: deer won't rut, dogs won't
lift to pee; and until I too go on to Hell,
the martins may never come again.

A child's experience, in the child's voice, of being allowed to join in a lynching--the subject could easily turn cliched, but this poem manages to keep a hard light on the memory--the sour bile, the bottles in the tree. The scene comes vividly alive. The martin's nest, full of eggs, just above the head of the child throwing up witnessing the horror--is a brilliant focus for the poem. It's the martin's nest and the skillful control of rhythm that charms me, here. --Fleda Brown



Second Place

Goose Step
by Lois P. Jones
Pen Shells

The Goose-Step
. . . is one of the most horrible sights in the world,
far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. --George Orwell

He loves to goose-step in her parking lot,
fluorescent light casting the stage
for Dachau. He grins in his brown
skinned suit, marvels at the way the Germans
treat him like a countryman. Loves the coarse
consonants of their commands, the wild sex
with the German girl he'd had on the road to Spain.

He wanders through Jewish graveyards to feel
the faded dates of the tombs. A pastime,
in the way that stepping is his pleasure
in the darkness. He loves the swastika,
tells her about its ancient origins, the dotted quadrants
of the Hindus, the Neolithic symbols 10,000 years
before Christ. "A tradition" that dates to the 17th century,
the Prussian army stepping on the faces of the enemy.

She finds him aesthetic, like the tall leather
boots of the Reichswehr. Tries to think
about his love of flamenco, the dark hollows
of his song unbedding a command. She knows
to pass under him is the terror
she needs. He knows to pass over her

like another graveyard. She prays the neighbors
are not looking. Begs him to stop but he smirks,
lifts his legs higher and higher. A sign of unity
like the men who stepped around Lenin's tomb.
It says that man can withstand all orders
for love, no matter how painful, how ludicrous.

A tightly controlled, dense poem that in its language evokes the goose-step itself. I like the way this poem moves from the image of marching (under the fluorescent light, scarier still!) to all the ramifications of the love affair, from flamenco dancing, to wild sex, to the study of gravestones--all at the emotional pitch that the word Nazi implies. "She finds him aesthetic" says everything we need to know about their relationship, and about what can drive people into inhuman behavior. --Felda Brown



Third Place

The Cardiologist Has a Word with Us
by Yolanda Calderon-Horn
The Town

Cold fingers prowl my spine
even though no one I know is
touching me: nothing doctors
can do. Not a thing. I brush

fingers on one sister's elbow,
greet my son's shoulder with mine.
Another sister clings to mami's hand.
My husband embraces me, lets go;

embraces, lets go. I call the rest
of my siblings in Chicago. I just
say it. I leave the hospital knowing
little about what comes next and too

much of what came before. Days after,
I'm a Radio Flyer covered in snow.
The body and mind lug its brood.
When I walk by young gals at the office,

endlessly pigging up their darling lives,
or the elderly neighbor shifting dust
to the street, I want to grab normalcy
by the collar, ask: why did you dump us?

I think of mami who has the right
or should raise her voice to suit,
and wonder if the phantom of the opera
will have untrained notes trapped

in my stomach. I go to bed trying
to sort fear from anger, resignation
from gratefulness, faith from hope.
I awaken tangled with pipes of the smoke.

I want to wish papi a feliz ano nuevo
the moment I walk through his door-
but the unpredictability of his failing
heart gobbles happy out of terms.

I stand by the fireplace hoping
the ice-storm will melt. Minutes later,
the hearth inhales moisture out of words:
my tongue is heavy like cooled clay.

I like the way this poem slips up on the sorrow, embedding it in the details before we understand its source. The Radio Flyer, the neighbor shifting dust/ to the street, the coworkers "pigging up their darling lives"--the images skillfully keep us one step away from the actual event, the one that matters. The poem stands in its length and its quatrains as testament to Emily Dickinson's poem that begins, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." I am particularly fond of "The Cardiologist..."s last two lines, the way the poem ends with "cooled clay." --Felda Brown



Honorable Mentions

Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!
by Guy Kettelhack
Desert Moon Review

Let it go? Vapid palliation! --
which at best can soothe one
into thinking there's a truth quite
simply to be had, if only we'd get
calm enough. Stuff it: here is
what I know today. I've got a cold
I'm almost happy won't too quickly
go away: I've just ingested
chicken broth with matzoh balls --
Balducci's tasty anti-flu soup (lower
east side wannabe) – and I've been
on a spree of fantasizing lightly:
watching Turner Classic Movies
circa 1933: and it's as if a Cupid
had alighted on my knee, to entertain
me with this possibility: that
someone full of glow whom I have
just begun to know might turn
into a Huck, or Jim -- I do so very
much like him. It's quite a mix, this
pile of pick-up sticks that one
calls one's perceptions: full of
chicken soup deceptions: but
nothing's here for seeing that we
haven't dreamed up into being: so
allow me Jim, or Huck, and I will
be the other shmuck, and it will
half be daring, half be luck,
if we, out on our raft, get into --
something -- ineluctable.


Red Cap
by Sarah J. Sloat
Wild Poetry Forum

Tarry, stray,
and you fall into his lap:

a pillory and bellylaugh --
for that is the plunge of strumpets.

Down the hatch lie rooms
strewn with wool, stockings

and children's shoes,
lined with moss and stumpage.

No surprise to hear
the village hiss, complicitous.

Gossips consider it
no mystery how girls

go down, kindling appetite,
when the wolf asks what you have

under your apron, little
mistress, and you reply --

wine and tarts, old beast,
a ruse, a rosebud.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for February 2008
Judge Fleda Brown
Congratulations!

First Place

Unmarked Graves
by Lois P. Jones
Pen Shells

All I want is a single hand,
A wounded hand if that is possible.
--Federico Garcia Lorca

Beautiful man, with your brows of broken ashes
and eyes that migrate in winter,

a hollow in your hand
where the moon fell through.

I could have kissed your mouth,
passed an olive with my tongue,
the aftertaste of canaries on our breath.

But the shriek of the little hour
is spent, and there is no road back.

The day it happened
there were no good boys
or dovecots filled with virgins,

just a sun imploding
like a sack of rotten oranges,

the scent of basil
from the grove near your home
and the piano that still waits for you.

No one will remember
the coward who shot you,
but the sheets,

the white sheets you sail on,
coming home.

I'm drawn to this poem from the first line--the "brows of broken ashes"--and continue to be delighted and surprised line after line by the fresh metaphors. This poem is all poem. It holds me aloft in its language. The death of Federico Garcia Lorca is made present, a "sun imploding/ like a sack of rotten oranges." I can only quote lines from this fine poem, which deserves not to be rendered into prose. The poem's ending is brilliant, "but the sheets,/ the white sheets you sail on, / coming home." How much more perfect can an ending be, for Lorca, and for us? --Fleda Brown



Second Place

1980
by Mitchell Geller
Desert Moon Review

Before the South End had been gentrified
and not a single latte had been brewed
on Tremont Street's still raffish, dodgy side
there was, on Union Park, an interlude

of wanton joy we later saw collapse;
a brief, Edenic interval of grace
before the second-hottest guy at "Chaps"
bore lurid lesions on his handsome face,

and soon, in weeks too sickeningly swift,
required -- at thirty -- that bony white cane.
Six short months and his mind began to drift,
in gaunt, enfeebled, piteous waves of pain.

We soon, alas, grew used to sights like this,
the idyll having changed to an abyss.

When a sonnet is good, it holds in a great deal of passion, using the struggle of the lines to keep it from flying apart in anguish. Here is a poem, maybe the only one like this I've seen, that eulogizes the "Edenic interval" before AIDS began its rampage in the gay communities. The voice in the poem is authentic, the language interesting ("Tremont Street's raffish, doggy side") and sometimes perfect--"that bony white cane." Although the couplet feels weaker than the rest, the end-rhymes "like this" and "abyss" do exactly what they need to do, pull us into the darkness. --Felda Brown



Third Place

Séance
by Adam Elgar
The Writer's Bock

I

Is anyone there?


Yes

In the scent that purrs
along the folds
of these old clothes

and in the sting
of happiness
remembered


Gather round

Interrogate
the tender fossils
heaped in this casket


splinters
from a translucent slipper

feathers
from a drowned lover’s wing

teeth and fingernails
hinted against the skin

a trace of distant birdsong

missing missing

an inheritance of knives
and so many kinds of hunger

over everything

lies a patina of stifled rage


We are this also

II

Is anyone there?


Of course

Commemorated
reverently framed
too intimate with God

Look how he shoulders faith
like a loaded rifle
certainty at odds
with memory’s sepia smudge


Here they all line up
these dry and bone-hard joys
fit for hate-darkened lovers


It all begins at dead of night
a whimpering boy
sure only of sleep
and danger


We are that also

I can't say exactly what the narrative of this poem is, except for the séance, but I'm delighted with where the short stanzas take me. As in a trance, I'm listening for what's missing--all the kinds of hunger and of rage that we're made of, that we've stifled, commemorated, even. The poem "purrs/ along the folds/ of these old clothes" to touch on, to barely suggest, what one enters a séance to obtain--some connection with the world just out of reach, the one that is like a loaded rifle, which probably resides within us. The whimpering boy that ends the poem is, the poem tells us, the beginning of what's stifled. --Felda Brown



Honorable Mentions

Black Man Carrying Alligator Briefcase
by Bernard Henrie
The Writer's Block

Only I know how my heart feels,
to lose from the beginning
and gain slowly, to give away
with both hands.
To enter rooms that fall silent.
The withering looks
and absentminded curiosity.
I listen, but fail to speak.

The cascading loneliness,
the deluge of expectations,
the grades and judgments
which leave me empty.

The feeling is not new,
but expressing the feeling is new;
I write more often in my diary book,
scribble to myself, gawk at myself,
fix a permanent record of what I know.

I smile like a man from the country
wearing the wrong clothes in the city.
Or when you leave work early
but miss your train and rest
on a bench in the idle station.



Hawaiian Chicken (not a recipe)
by Alice Folkart
Blueline

A fine flock of feral chickens
flutter and budget beside Pali highway.

Feathers ruffle, rusted by the rain
downy breasts blackened by mildew.

Rooster-king alert, proprietary, bright-eyed,
herds wind-up chicks toward the hen-harem.

Tiny brains in weensy heads search out
tasty tidbits, wriggling worms, juicy grubs.

Scratching, slicing with skeletal yellow feet
in the rotted leaves at the very edge of tangled forest.

Raging traffic roars a foot away,
as unreal to them as distant galaxies are to us.



Stoma
by Laurie Byro
About Poetry Forum

The bag my mother carries coos
like a muffled baby owl. She hides it on
her side like a purse with gold and silver
coins left to spend. When she moves it gurgles

like a sooty faced bird, more raven than eagle.
She is self conscious, afraid it will fly away
without her. She fears her life will be set loose
like a snake in its hungry beak. What is left,

after the surgeons cut part of her away,
is this graceless winged woman, a white gown
instead of plumes, a thatch of broken weeds.

The doctor has no magic tricks up his sleeves. She sits
on her nest incubating regret, hums while morning
streaks the sky red. She waits on her little clay throne.