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 October 2008
Judges Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald
Congratulations!

First Place

Ache
by Michael Creighton
The Waters


The year I turn 15, my father leaves me
with my just-widowed grandfather
and my first full-time summer job.
Each day in my lunch, I find fresh fruit

and a sandwich so fat it stretches
my jaw. Axe down, among rows
of old pine, I learn to love
the tang and bite of mustard on rye.

After work, I stay out with friends,
walking the town's mile-long
main street, drinking cold soda,
looking for girls.

If he's awake when I return
we discuss baseball,
the difference between jack pine
and white, or the pain

in my shoulders and neck.
He says, the Cubs haven't won a pennant
since your mother was three
but there's no harm in hope;

jack pine grows fast, but gives
poor wood--and as for that pain,
son, there is no cure for an ache like that,
save deep sleep and time.

Just once I come home early--
he is slumped in an old oak chair.
As he sleeps, his shoulders shake.
Dust hangs in sunlit air.


This was very close. It was almost a tie between first and second. We loved the rhythm of the poem, the story it told, and the conciseness of the writing. Its theme is both personal and universal. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Second Place

Convalescence
by Antonia Clark
The Waters


She lures him back by naming what he loves --
constellations, rivers -- repeating days and dates,
drawing the drapes to make an island.

One year, she let him keep her from catching
trains. In another, she gave up seasides, long ago
stored her silk kimono away on a high shelf.

A long whistle wails from the trestle
but there is no place here to stop.


We loved the poetry and atmosphere evoked. This poem beautifully tells a story and creates a whole world in few words. The last image of the wailing of the train is a haunting one. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Third Place
Debris
by Ashura
Pen Shells

Wong
has no name of favor, but is called
for convenience the way a hill
is climbed or a floor
swept. She will not revere
your gods or walk
the guidance of your hands
When you turn her head she will resist
your intensity, your compulsions
And when your fingers stir
debris from your pockets
her exit will be
impersonal

Somewhere
on the cusp of her breath
there is tremolo
She hands it with flowers and a plastic
bucket filled with medicines to
the men in saffron who drip water
on her temples
and chant

while you wait on
the steps with her
shoes

This poem has a wonderful flow to it. There is something mysterious and fetching about it. It keeps the reader engaged and curious. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Honorable Mentions


awake
James Lineberger
SaltyDreams


until i turned seventy
i could still do it one leg
crooked around
the upper rung of an a-ladder extension
leaning back easy arms free
to hold the drill with both hands
and fasten a new board
covering up
a raccoon hole on the fascia at the rear
of the house but then

then

there comes a time when you struggle
out of bed
to discover you can't accomplish
the familiar foolhardy
things you're so accustomed to
and not even
your wife will applaud you now when it is she herself
trying to remember to walk
the dogs
and your daughter coming over
to mow the lawn

and you learn
it's only in our dreams we have any
joy in this life
the nightmares lying awake
same as we

stretching their fucked-up knees to face the day



Compression
by Linda E. Cable
SplashHall Poetry


I was born somewhere between
tank parades, and blond step tables
adorned with oriental maidens
standing guard at picture windows.

The world turned hard and plastic
and the word was white.
It was lunch buckets, and fins at five o'clock,
gliding through cul-de-sacs.

Veterans scanned new laid sod for insurgents,
seeking rest on rayon sofas,
sustenance on TV tables,
quiet nights and just rewards.

One act plays were cast on patios,
blue collar boasts of Bradley and Patton,
housewives flouncing in skirts from Federals
to the tune of "Love Letters In The Sand."

We seemed so pretty then,
living advertisements for Amana,
True Grit and American Bandstand,
crayon copies of black and white movie stars.

I came of age somewhere between
The Mickey Mouse Club and Dallas,
in the year alabaster figurines shattered
with the sound of the first gun shot.


Imagination of the Deflated Balloon
by Henry Shifrin
Wild Poetry


The balloon lies marooned beside a stain
of a foot on an empty section of rug.

Smells of burned rubber where its tip
kissed a match. It had been so lonely
and the breeze, so gentle. The wind's

hand lifted gracefully toward the flame,
warm but too warm. The balloon leaves
the moment to dream: it fills with air,

rises into the clouds. Grounded fog
depresses all it covers, but moving
through clouds has a holy chill.

The balloon populates the sky
with round bodies, remembers
the static lightning two bodies

can rub into being -- the shock
that erases the space between them.
Realizes movement isn't as necessary

as thought, and so it inflates a friend
it knew when they clung to the same

lamp post, over the happy-birthday
sign and compared the size
of their shadows.

This balloon always darkened
the ground more than others.

At least it dreamed it that way.


Musée de la Résistance - Vaucluse
by Adam Elgar
Writer's Block


(Lavez les épluchures de pommes de terre, les jeter dans l'huile
bouillante. C'est aussi bien que les vraies frites.

Wartime advice on food economy, 1942 -- from a newspaper on display
in the museum)


In truth it nobly celebrates defeat,
confronts the shame by putting it on show,
tells later generations how deceit
seeps into victims' veins, makes sure we know

that victors try to put a price on air
and claim there never was a word for 'free'.
Starvation is the trump card. Pommes de terre:
prochaine distribution -- mardi.

It's all about the lies that people tell
to keep themselves afloat till truth comes back.
When brutal fact says il n'y a plus de lait

you have to come up with a counter-spell,
revive the rage that we complacent lack.
"Dissent. Resist." What else should freedom say?


Talk Like a Pirate Day*
by Catherine Rogers
Poets.org


Arr, I say. Arr. My darling
is unimpressed. He twists
his face in ways I can't
imagine and growls
AAAArrrrrrrrrrrgghh!
just like that. Scoundrel!
I love it when you talk
sea dog. The rest of the day
we go about calling each other
"Me hearty." At supper,
he calls for grog. I tell him he'll get
slop, and like it, or I'll have him
keelhauled. He orders me
to swab the decks. I tell him
that's the mate's job. We talk
about whether we want a cabin boy
or girl--it doesn't matter,
as long as it's healthy and strong
enough to do the swabbing.
All day we've imagined parrots
and dirks and doubloons.
On the other side of midnight,
the quotidian looms
like Her Majesty's man o' war.
Tomorrow, I'll be the one
with two earrings. He'll have none,
and dress in gray. No matter;
tonight we unbuckle our swashes
and heave to. We rock together
at anchor, dreaming of plunder,
free and ferocious, all night long.


*An international holiday observed annually on September 19