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 July 2008
Judge Tony Barnstone
Congratulations!

First Place

Feast of Disappointments
by Linda E. Cable
Wild Poetry Forum


I have come to the potatoes,
paring them down swiftly,
chanting your sins to the sink
until I hold another offering,
haphazard orbs the color of old eggs
and I choke on the smell of mud.

A room away you snore,
clutching at visions,
dreaming of butter,
gravy and youth.

I have seen your belly rise, fall,
still aching for round things;
sweet breast of melon,
pickled cucumbers biting
your sun broken lips,
the rain taste of green grapes;
ever a man of appetites.

In the fields, you confessed,
pulled up my skirt
with no concern
for the fallow years.

Now we are about potatoes;
the ticktock of consuming
roots in silence,
ignoring the pull of the scythe.

During those blind years
we knew nothing of wasted nights,
two beds, pressed against separate walls.
I boil Canaan with turnips,
served up on wedding plates.


The poem is intimate, a lyrically overheard bit of memory-thought-consciousness. At first I worried that it might be too tight, too controlled, but ultimately found myself admiring the image rhymes (eggs with melons with breasts with grapes with potatoes with bellies), the cooked-up assonance and consonance of all those great monosyllables (hold, orbs, old, eggs, choke, mud), the way roots and fertility and the difficult emotional harvest, cooking and appetite and consuming waste all interact in the semantic shadow of the poem. The poem keeps singing in the mind after you turn away from the page--a struck bell. --Tony Barnstone



Second Place

Seventeen, Before the First Time
by Ange Law
thecriticalpoet.com


Shoulder pout like Harlow.
Inciting reaction,
mouth a buzz full of bees.
She slams a mirror door,
glass splinters- catch tongue.
Wonders what it's like to slash your wrists
flapper style.
Conjures scarysexy to suck
with heretic teeth.
In the garden, genuflects to the god of lipstick,
makes her mouth arterial,
backhanding red across the intrusive flowers.
Stalks through grass three foot high
desperate for knowledge of passion.
Lying in it,
grasps handfuls of green,
twists,
then it's...
his hair a catch kiss of curls,
his eyes dark as dejected pews on Sunday.
In a furnace face blast,
she orgasms spontaneously,
lets go laughing...laughing.
Scrapes shiny off the sun,
smears her body
with forty- eight shades of golden.

Usually, I find poems that use this particular bag of tricks are unsuccessful. Portmanteau words like "scarysexy" are thirty years out of date now, the substitution of parts of speech for each other is an e.e. cummings trick that's hard to imitate well, and the artificial and extreme compression that leads to a dropping of the personal pronouns seems to reek of the MFA workshop poem. So, why on earth does this poem work so well? It has a utter psychic wildness to it, a deep, archetypal vocabulary that tickles the unconscious with a knife, a relentless sexual pace, and gorgeous sounds. Maybe that's why? I love the fact that the poet has made these old, warped arrows shoot true. --Tony Barnstone



Third Place

Roots
by Ken Ashworth
The Writer's Block


When I was a kid, I never knew why
one leg breaks the whole horse,
or how a circle the size of my thumb
pulls the whole ocean after it,
but I learned all there was to know
about girls behind Brindle's barn
when Alice Paxton broke my tooth out
with her lunch box for trying to slide
my hand up her whithers and cop a feel.

I stood there in a moment of half disbelief
slivering my tongue in and out of the slot
that was now not-tooth, the taste of an old penny
strong at the back of my throat,

watched as she worried the hem of her dress,
smoothing and re-smoothing that spot my hand got to.
Her eyes began to well and she burst
out in tears, terrified I might have swallowed it.

We searched for it until dusk, scuffled clumps of
hay with our feet exposing the soft underbelly
of loam that was both not-earth and not-manure,

until there was just enough light left to make
our way down the fence line, fingers tipped together
across the top wire, both of us knowing that soon,
she would turn and disappear within a twist
of green corn rows and I would watch until
she became smaller than the stalks, then go on.

That night I dreamed the tooth took root
and grew into a tree like the one in the dream
of Nebuchadnezzar which covered the whole earth,
and I wove my way among its branches
to the one which stopped just at her window,
slipped inside sucking a wet handkerchief.

Smell of dung still fresh in my shoe treads
I slid in beside her holding my breath,
sifting her hair with my fingers, trying hard
not to wake her and to conceal the bulge in the maw of my jeans;
the medicine bottle where I kept the tooth.

This is a good narrative poem, lovely in its bones. It has wonderful sounds ("dusk, scuffled clumps," "tooth took root"), cool verbs ("slivering my tongue in and out of the slot / that was now not-tooth"), and the poet knows that the good narrative poem moves, that the story turns rhetorically, lyrically, narratively, or better yet, all three, as this one does. The move into tooth-root-tree dream is what made me fall in love with the poem, along with the perfectly right strangeness of certain lines. I don't know why when the protagonist climbs the world-tree into her window he's sucking a wet handkerchief, but instinctively I love that he's doing so. --Tony Barnstone



Honorable Mentions


Drowse
by Bernard Henrie
Poets.org


Sunburned
water lilies,
a dozen birds
fly up
stunned.

The cat moves
room to room,
stops.

Plums
flicker out.

Shiftless
radios turn off.

Afternoons
fall deaf.

I enjoyed the poem's small ambitions---just a little sketch, some atmosphere, some sound pyrotechnics, spare words and no words to spare. The cat and the plums and the ambition evoke William Carlos Williams in his Imagist/Objectivist phase, but the atmospherics I think recall more the small, gorgeous poems of Jean Follain. It's hard to write a good Imagist poem. A Chinese shi hua (poetry talk) says it best:

Plain and Natural: First master elegance, and then strive for the plain style. Nowadays many people write clumsy, facile poems and flatter themselves that they've mastered the plain style. I can't help laughing at this. Poets know that simplicity is difficult. There are poems that illustrate the rigor the plain style demands:

Today as in ancient times
it's hard to write a simple poem.
by Mei Yaochen

The lotus flower rises from clear water,
naturally without ornament.
by Li Bai

Plain and natural lines are best.

from Sunny Autumn Rhymed Language --Tony Barnstone



Aftertaste
by Brenda Morisse
Wild Poetry Forum


She sways to this half-tone
day, staggers like smoke on a tight
rope of discontent. The depth
of forever passes for lilies
in this muckheap.
She has no head for the world
and its free-for-all needlework
of bill collectors
and spiteful windows.
The floor is cluttered with bottle
caps and cans, so she drapes
the sofa on the ceiling and hovers
cross-legged and side-by-side
with the overhead.
If you ask me, she isn't a saint
although she's very photogenic.
Whoever heard of a pin-up saint
hawking pilsner? Her mother nagged
her to marry rich, but her heart
was never a cash register.
It's always been the beer: sweetish,
malty Munich and the drier,
hoppy Franconian. Her shoebox is filled
with bits of broken
jewelry: rhinestones and paste,
pot metal and silver. Can openers.
Hardware softened by careless
spools of wires, head pins, eye pins,
disheveled bracelets, wrong-way earrings.
Orphans in this box have a way of tugging
at heart strings. The ring is broken
in. Remember when they were head
over heels, before life warped the metal,
and marriage became too hard to wear?
The sum of her memories is tied in knots.
I heard she was run out of town, a bartender
with stigmata. It's not hygienic. Our St. Pauli
call girl resists know-it-all-gravity
and the attraction it mandates,
contradicts spiked heels,
prods her to wear a bra. Pompous gravity,
bombastic gravity, she says. I will walk
on water, I will stop time. I levitate.
Get over yourself!
She is younger than her adult children.
She prefers polka dot baring midriff tops.
Mardi Gras without Lent.

I was tempted to make this poem a winner because of its utter wildness, its relentless flow of metaphorical and surreal jabber, its swerving, unexpected rhetoric. Sometimes that craziness leads to a kind of mental disorder, mixed metaphors, a semantic slippage of adjectives that seem not exactly exact or exacting but certainly interesting. Add some sort of turn to the poem so it develops more, can or renew the few cliches (tugging at heart strings, head over heels), and this one could be a real keeper. --Tony Barnstone



Sleep
by Tom Allen
poets.org


As when an old moose
with wolves hanging
from his ankles and rump
and wolves grabbing
for his face
bulls his way bleeding
to the edge of the lake
and with all
his last strength
inch by inch
fights to get deeper in
until the wolves
have to let go
and at last he stands
up to his nose
in red water
and watches the pack
wandering helpless on shore
falling back into the trees
watches with eyes
from which terror
is draining

The extreme, elaborate metaphor is one that tempts one to say, "hold on, now" but ultimately works as a bravado move and makes this small poem work powerfully, with each short, packed line struggling down the page like the bull moose deeper into the water. Whew! And I thought I had sleep problems! --Tony Barnstone