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> IBPC Winning Poems, 2008, Congratulations Poets!
Cleo_Serapis
post Feb 17 08, 15:39
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Mosaic Master
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Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



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.


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Jun 15 08, 12:16
Post #2


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for May 2008
Judge Patricia Smith
Congratulations!


First Place

Sunday with Labrador
by Sarah J. Sloat
The Waters



My dog doesn't need the Church.

She wants hands; she wants
the vagabond, to lope and mosey
with the whole body.

My dog wants nothing to do
with bloodshed or fluorescent lighting.
She's here to unpack the grass.

Don't try to teach her property.

Like God, she's not industrious.

She goes along, eating what she finds.
Brown today, brown
all day tomorrow.

From the very first line ("My dog doesn't need the Church"), this concise little life lesson had me in its capable clutches. I loved its practicality, its tiny truths, its barely subdued smile. It's sparse and economical, but it backs a big wallop. I've shared this with merely a million people, and not all of them have dogs. And the last line is an unqualified classic, tolerating absolutely no argument. None whatsoever. Love it. --Patricia Smith



Second Place

What April in New York Is
by Guy Kettelhack
About Poetry Forum



You take your bony awkwardness into the April day --
too warm for May -- and yet the nearly naked trees are
barely March: well, that's what April in New York is.
Gold scrabbles here and there: forsythia: frail runty yellow
feathers sprout from scanty soil -- buttering a toss of corners
in the side-walked town: you stumble down the pavement
like a scarecrow with a tooth ache: pretty close to true.
(Another poem snatches pain from you and turns it
into point of view.) If you are to love this city you suppose

it can't be only when the two of you are pretty, which
Lord knows, right now, my dear, you aren't. Currents lurch:
bipolar -- hot/cold -- devil-zephyrs from the river twiddle with
the ordinariness of people -- tourists: bodies are a weight
and bother, something may be flourishing but it is not sweet
human pulchritude. The sun's too rude, and flesh too
blank and pale and bulbous and mistaken to be taken
seriously. Mysteriously, though, you've got to have a taste
of it: you take your aches uptown to Central Park --

decide to walk up to the Metropolitan Museum's art. All
the geologic outcrops! -- rocks and runners! -- gray
and unused to the light: squiggly growing green shoots
make it impolite to stare: they'd clearly rather not be there,
all embryonic in the glare. Damn the chronic pain of
everything! -- and yet it paints a sort of wash of interest:
splinters of a prickly sensibility that keep you walking and alert
and almost happy with discomfort. Grandeur of the Met
begets its usual surreal imperial effrontery: columns,

steps and quandaries of what to look at first: but
you are on a mission to do two things: see if your sore
mouth can eat a sandwich in the cafeteria, then walk into
the Pompeii bedroom painted gold and blue and red
you caught a glimpse of on your television set that morning
from your bed. The sandwich is a bust: leaves you scowling
(the ghosts of both your wisdom teeth are howling):
but oh! -- the room. Roman glory turns the page
and places you in habitable plot. Let the April day resume.

Here we've got the just the opposite, a wildly ambitious, cluttered sensory celebration that deftly captures the rhythms of the world's most complicated city. My favorite line, the one that gives the tale an intriguing twist, is "If you are to love this city you suppose it can't be only when the two of you are pretty..." From there, the momentum takes over, and--especially if you read this city setpiece aloud--it just gets better and better. --Patricia Smith



Third Place

Via!
by Allen M. Weber
Desert Moon Review



She likes to hike her dirty denim pants,
to teeter on a trash receptacle--
the daring daughter of a spectacle
that people pass without a sideways glance.

Behind an Appomattox five-day fast,
Miss Via's waking found her drunk and stark,
balled up inside her three-wheeled grocery cart.
She stretched and mumbled how she couldn't last

in cities of her selves. In store-front glass
she strikes a pose of someone else's life--
an author or a famous bastard's wife.
If beetle-black reflections scurry past

she'll trap them with the dash-like Emily.
And if she carries tomes about the town--
because there's no good way to set them down--
the critic cites her incivility.

Tonight beneath Graffiti Overpass,
she flings tomatoes at her drying work
daubed overhead. Ideas on a lark
lean Via west like tributary grass

before a petulant Atlantic : She
may lumber through the lower altitudes,
strip down the dress of urbane attitudes,
and clamber above inhibiting scree.

Out there she'll learn to taste untroubled air,
to make her water on unpublished leaves,
to rub her narrow rump on trunks of trees,
to go as Appalachian as a bear.

"She stretched and mumbled how she couldn't last/in cities of her selves"--lines such as that one fueled this marvelous character study. I was engaged me so immediately that the creative adherence to form was a secondary, unexpected delight. --Patricia Smith



Honorable Mentions


Fountain
by Douglas Hill
Wild Poetry Forum


I recall the spiral down the spit-fountain
in my father's dental chamber: I leaned
too long over the sucking shiny throat,
stalled, steeling against my return to
his adept hands wielding instruments
that would drill precisely into my fault.

I lay back dry mouthed on that baroque
black barbershop chair, as if for a trim,
scissors on the sides; resigned to the rest,
longing for a sip of water, some respite.
He turned secretively as he would in
the kitchen to decant a tumbler of scotch.

The pestle riffed a hard hissing mantra:
he urged it against the mortar, mixing
the mystic silver-mercury amalgam;
then into me flooded the moment of bonding
more intimate than thirst:
his soft warm fingers in my mouth.

I'm the dictionary definition of a daddy's girl, and this gentle poem--so full of specific detail, yet at its center a tender and intense moment between father and child--hit me right in the heart. --Patricia Smith


Marigolds
by Sally Arango Renata
South Carolina Writer's Workshop

Rust scallops the red wheelbarrow,
left too long in mud by the shed. Still,
it carries the white rocks that have to be
cleared from the garden - in time
they'll be spread as a path.

The handle on the short shovel is broken,
but held right, it cuts sharp through stones
and carries them to the mound of clippings,
weeds, the alien balls of bound roots.

The rose can use morning sun and composted
dung. I trim dried buds and yellow leaves,
more than one thorn penetrates my thin gloves.
I take them off to mound the soil

around the crown of root, leaving them off
to stick my finger in sandy soil
planting seeds. Peppers, tomatoes,
broccoli, collards, I'll can what I can't eat --

or trade with the neighbor for pears
when their tree is weighed, breaking,
abundant.

It was called a Victory Garden during the Big War
when sugar and meat were rationed, but the garden
for this war will be called Forgiveness,

and I'll surround it with marigolds,
so the souls can find their way home.

I love the simple instructive tone of this piece, its solidness and warmth. I couldn't decide if the last night was touching or trite, so--maybe because I'm a child of concrete and brick, pitifully inept in matters of the soil--I chose to be touched. --Patricia Smith


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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