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 August 2008
Judge Tony Barnstone
Congratulations!

First Place

Tsunami Prelude
by Brenda Levy Tate
Pen Shells


Salt water curls back - tongue against sky roof.
Mud sucks and hisses, salivary, raw red
gleaming to horizon like a muscle sheath.
It is miraculous, this wrenched ocean, sudden
absence of tide. Even gulls are astonished.
Thin cloud scallops edge emptiness. Blind bivalves
sputter and spout as I cross their wet bed.

Caught among flotsam, barnacled pine-limbs
point fingerbones. Impaled, a child's photo
grins grey, wavers. My own eyes (little changed),
bedraggled hair-bow, missing tooth. No acne yet.
I refuse to save myself. Beside a tampon case,
my jewel-box gapes, pink and broken. It may
have just given birth to something unnameable.

Storm petrels knife into the wind. To my left,
an old man bends toward a stained helmet;
three women on my right drape prom dresses
over their arms - lace bodices, tulle skirts.
Half-buried in silt, an Evening in Paris bottle
reminds me I'm allergic. But today's scents
are kelp, rust, blended fresh remains.

This is too large a harvest for one season.
Diaries with vinyl covers; teen dolls holding
tiny 45s. Worn saddle shoes (brown trim,
not the black I wanted). Oak cane - I know it
from my closet debris. Scattered costume beads,
brooches, safety pins, cracked glass goblets.
Decanter I once gave my dad for his birthday.

I stamp on a wedding ring with cheap
diamond chips. Circular imprint: perfect fake
clamhole. Dried-rose-petal dervishes blow
across cumuli. Ululations (ecstasy? anguish?)
roil heat haze. On the beach, girls' cries disturb
this universe. Freight-train-thundershake.
Tourists yell run in their language. Not mine.

Along a naked seafloor, silver leaps joyous
and unintelligent. When the rro-ooo-ll is called up
yo-o-onder. I'm not sure where I'll be, except not
there. The promdress ladies are gone, nothing left
but a mohair stole. I wrap myself in woolscratch,
recall Nana knitting its duplicate. Senior year.
It scrapes at my skin like an oyster knife.

I lie down, open myself.

We'll drown, the old man reassures me.

Foam gargles toward us.

That's the point.


The great strength of this poem lies in the care and interest it gives to description, especially in the wonderful and strange first two stanzas. I enjoy the physicality of the receded ocean like a mouth, the tongue of the waves curled back, the raw red mud like muscle sheath. Though the poet restrains him or herself from saying so, implicitly it makes the oceanic force of the gathering Tsunami a godlike thing, a great god tongue coming to lick the world clean of life. The second stanza gives us a picture of the flotsam that the narrator and others are gathering in the bed of the receded ocean---all the detritus of their lives, child photos, tampon cases, and especially that very strange jewel box gaping, pink and broken. It is a strange image of the mother-vagina that has birthed something unnameable. The red mud echoes the Hebrew for Adam ("red earth") and the vaginal jewel box gives us an intertextual echo of the myth of Pandora and just a hint of the Yeats' apocalyptic beast slouching towards Bethlehem. So the creation story of Genesis is joined to the Greek myth of the origin of monsters, which have birthed (it seems) this monster storm. Out of that monstrous beginning will come the apocalyptic end of the poem's little world made cunningly. Why does the protagonist stay on the mud to drown as the water gathers and rolls toward her, refusing to save herself, choosing instead to lie down and open herself? I don't know, exactly. Yet that strange ending, in which the old man reassures her that drowning is somehow the point of it all, has an instinctive rightness to me. Why resist the god-tongue's watery word? Why not drown in god and let him/her wash the things of your life away? What will remain then? --Tony Barnstone



Second Place

Living in the Body of a Firefly
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review


Cotton mouthed, hung over, I wake up in my sooty dress
somehow ashamed to be seen in the utter waste

of daylight. The barbecue with all those mint juleps
on the verandah was intense but I strayed too long on the edge

of a glass. I long for a quiet train trestle, wood and paint
chipping off, not those city lights where I am one of millions.

I'm not fooled by the low murmurings of the river,
cattails to luxuriate in, but danger in the deep-throated

baritone of frogs. Damselflies are entirely self-involved
and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds. Never mind,

there's safety in numbers. A neighbor has an easy split
in a porch screen and as I'm on a tear of wild nights

before I die, I've set my sights on their cathedral ceiling.
In the sway of tall grasses his youngest cups her hands

around me to pray. I am coveted in the moist chapel of fingers.
Tonight, I'll hang around until they are all half lidded-drowsy.

I'll skitter down to her favorite blanket where she'll wish
upon me like I am the last star falling, the last creature on earth.


I was engaged by this character who wakes in the waste of daylight in her sooty dress, partied out, smoked over, yet dreams herself a firefly leaving the city lights to be a light in the country, caught in the chapel of a child's cupped hands, a star falling to her at night, a fairy wish. Better that than to be a damselfly, "self-involved / and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds." It's magical, and utterly romantic, or more accurately, Romantic, in its division of life into innocence and experience, country and city, childhood and adulthood. As a critic I read back in grad school critic said, "Romantic poetry is a long walk into the sublime, and a short walk back." Who can really write a Romantic poem today and get away with it? Something about this poem's assured movement, its magical images, its tenderness, allows me to like it, because there will always be a Romantic in poetry, and the only question is the one that the moderns (especially Frost, Williams, Yeats, and Stevens) posed themselves: how to renew the Romantic impulse in a world in which the machines have won and the country has retreated to city parks and potted plants? --Tony Barnstone



Third Place

Surviving the Ugly
by Sandy Benitez
SplashHall


On a dusty dirt road
squats a rundown mosque.
Rumors point to a new
recreation center for soldiers.
I, an "infidel" disagree.
Blasphemy! To put American
spit-shine on its dingy blue tiles.

Escort duty--hours of sitting,
walking in circles without
a straight jacket. The sun above
Baghdad angrier here than back home.
Dropping heat bombs,
exploding on armpits and breasts.
Five days of wearing the same
sweat-stained bra. Baby powder
works wonders. A soldier
swears by Febreze; his trousers
going on a record eight days.

In the hooch, I thank God
for air conditioning. Say hello
to Mother Mary watching me
quietly from the blanket.
She doesn't belong here, in this
unfamiliar place. Still, she's
an acceptable battle buddy;
comforting me when nightmares
creep into my skull, ricocheting
horrors of war like sporadic bullets
fired in the air.

Suddenly, sirens scream,
"Duck & Cover! Duck & Cover!"
Channel 16 on the radio shreaks static,
"Help me!"
I can't understand a word.
Thunderous seconds knock me down.
A flip flop lands across the room!
Tasting hair and lint. Boom!
Wait for it... Boom!
Is there enough life insurance? Boom!
Will my children remember me?
Silence.
Except for my pounding heart.
A quick "Amen."

The siren returns,
chanting "all clear! all clear!"
Helicopter blades loudly buzz,
giant dragonflies gone berserk.
Always in pairs,
off to find bad boys
who played with daddy's rockets
when mommy wasn't looking.

Mother Mary calls to me.
"Sit down and breathe."
Offers me water; I sip, shake my fears.
We resume the evening
watching tv. Game shows; she beats
me at Jeopardy every time.
Relax.
Stretch legs, eyelids lower.
My toenails are horrible;
they need clipping.


This poem's portrait of the ordinary grimness and griminess of military life, punctuated by moments of extraordinary stress, could be the merest cliche, just a topical poem about (one assumes) the war in Iraq that relies on current events to lend it power and emotion. But it's not. I love the details of the poem--the soldier who sprays his trousers with Febreze (which I use to get the smell of cat piss out of my pillows and couch), the protagonist whose armpits and breasts are bombarded by the desert sun's heat bombs, the helicopters blading past like giant dragonflies gone bezerk. I felt that the poem faltered a bit here and there (I'm not convinced that the characterization of the enemy as "bad boys / who played with daddy's rockets / when mommy wasn't looking" is an effective irony). Finally, though, what sold me on the poem was the simplicity and psychological rightness of the protagonist's focus on that sweat-stained bra, a rightness which comes back even more powerfully in the thoughts which run through her mind as war zone life returns to its strange normality of television and Jeopardy after the bombardment ends: "My toenails are horrible; / they need clipping." --Tony Barnstone



Honorable Mentions


How Soft is the Blackness that Cannot Bring Me Joy
by Ellen Kombiyil
Blueline


Day dawns, bright as chrysanthemums.
I am balanced on the brink of the earth.
Somewhere else, light fades
on the edge of chalk-white cliffs.
I can taste them, dry as death.
Nightingales sing the last song of night.
If only I could graze your arm,
your imagined scent still clinging to the pillow.
I try to remember but not to think,
that's what Jesse Jackson says
when he remembers Memphis.
I'd like to adopt a philosophy like that.
Philosophy is meaningless when sun hits the pillow.
I was young when I met you bling-blinging at the party
to the sounds of revamped disco.
Night tasted of sweat.
You'd forgotten my name
because I wore my best dress.
How soft is the blackness that cannot bring me joy
you said, or something like that.
The elusive smoke of giddiness
crept into our heads
and love was like a funeral.
We fell through earth
and swam out upside down the other side.
Little Boo spelunked the forests,
convinced I was vanished.
I hadn't said au revoir or sounded a warning note.
Years from now I will write a song
and you will not hear it
shaking the forsythia, their drab bells
having forgotten your name.
Your name means 'ocean' or 'lake,'
or 'teeming with life,' or 'vessel,'
and I remember what water sounds like
only when it rains:
the river widens its mouth;
the forsythia sings hallelujah.
Ca ne fait rien,
it was so long ago and morning has sprung:
sunlight empties through porch windows
to echo in the parlor.


Although this poem tries to get away with one cliche ("Dry as death"), it's great strength is in the surprise and strangeness of its surges and shifts of image and mind. I fell in love with funny lines like "I was young when I met you bling-blinging at the party / to the sounds of
revamped disco," and surreal emotional images such as,

The elusive smoke of giddiness
crept into our heads
and love was like a funeral.
We fell through earth
and swam out upside down the other side.

"Philosophy is meaningless when sun hits the pillow," eh? Okay. And yet this poem's erotic, emotional journey is more about experiencing the Zen flash and holding back thought in a less discursive way, about the sound of water you remember when it rains, about sunlight emptying "through porch windows / to echo in the parlor." I like this poem's tenderness, and its very peculiar movements of mind and syntax. --Tony Barnstone



If Men Wore Lip Paint
by Bernard Henrie
The Writer's Block


I am an amateur of love,
but I will write a love poem.

I will say:

the moon is yellow as a goldfish
and big as the breast
of an opera singer.

No.

I would write about
the rich thighs of widows,
or an older woman burnished
by the meticulous night
and speaking Spanish
in loving tongue
to a younger man.

I will write for a heavy woman
sitting in an airport terminal, called
from a pasha couch in a garden,
a cumquat delicately placed
under her clothes.

Young women in summer dresses
half-hidden by a curved boat hull,
shirt fronts buttoned by men
who gaze as though saying rosary.

Rain passes into the night,
love grows old, poems fall asleep
in a chair.

Let me start again:

if men wore lip paint, breasts
and hips of women
would stain red.


This poem is a sweet, lyrical poem, and that's nice. However, what makes it interesting is its swerves, the quick shtick of magician's tricks, using syntax to surprise, pulling it like taffy into looping, loopy mental shapes. --Tony Barnstone



Seiren Song
by Steve Parker
criticalpoet.org


that made him yearn not for women not water's shades
some same cool and riversides
and rat-shatters and ice and low bursts

and green fingers stretching for his
only to drug as from strings words
out of him but to a night-sky whirled
in lofts within reach of that fishman

which spun from salt jism ancestors the while
alert to tugs the binary [fire] engine-putting
(slow as yawls) (moans of location) (mist)

over years over
humming shadow machinery
limbic waves of song

take me up he crieth take
in the Fall flowered as arrayed death dynamited

grey-flopping up murk-bearing O grim-aspected

fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen
casting of sparks, bearing of eggs, spuming of milt

some psentage've what hear've in dead channels
outflow've of a litl bang

your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting

but this, this


(O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia
thy mermids ist none so faire—
what outspankered prismes, what
neutic flutic combes soonest they bare)


Yes, I know that this poem seems to descend into gibberish pretty regularly, and that it has absolutely wild shifts in register (from the contemporary diction of "your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting" to the overwrought alliterative diction of "fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen" to the archaism of "O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia / thy mermids ist none so faire--").
But, wow, it's fun. And I like those twists of diction, shifts and frictions of reference and rhetoric. Finally, I like the author's great sense of humor, as he or she blends nonce words in with the archaisms. I don't know what "outspankered prismes" are, nor what it means to bare one's "neutic flutic combes," but the newness and oldness and weirdness of the language are such that, frankly, I don't care. I can guess. The poem seems to be a Frankenstein monster stitched together from odd literary corpses and the bloody pieces of the author's imagination, written in the ideogrammatic method of that crazy old fascist Ezra Pound. But, unlike far too many of Pound's Cantos, this monster's got a jolt of life to make its limbs twitch. Watch it rise from its slab and wander the countryside until it's pulled in by the siren song of the old man's violin. --Tony Barnstone