IBPC Winning Poems, 2009, Congratulations Poets! Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for January 2009
Judge Elena Karina Byrne
Congratulations!

First Place
New Neighbors
by Eric Rhohenstein
criticalpoet.org


Yellow jackets ascend like mortar fire from the cherry’s split trunk.

Spikes of fennel rise in the side yard,
where the garden was before the old man died;
his grandson somersaults through a choke of new clover.

The day is dry;
I should be cutting lawn.

squirrel at the birdfeeder
ground-skirt of grackles
the village the village!
fire alarm hum crescendo, and again

Much like autumn wind: product of a gavel falling.

(Soon enough, the cherry’s branches set against a winter skin of sky)

Boy, do you hear the pop songs aging,
aging from kitchen windows?

(Across Erie, the edge of Canada erupting from spring lake-mist)

Some things are broken before they’re ever bent,
but only some.

(One day, the summery inside of a woman)

hay-rolls at the velvet
edge of vision sunrise sunset
and how it goes,
and how it went.

As if this was the start of anything;
it’s only a lion’s mouth grown wider, wider, roaring.

Much like your mother’s: the logic of donning play-clothes, of not missing dinner.

farmers’ daughters fatten up
we sons of nothing much
the village cream is drawn
cup by cup make whey! make whey!

Afternoon dogs sing the pressure of dawn.


"New Neighbors" ignites a fresh, sensory motion forward. At "the edge of vision" the poem revitalizes literal vision alongside the figurative vision of the mind's eye, "how it goes." Language in motion becomes a key process of seeing through an ever-changing domino-effect of metaphor: yellow jackets ascend, a grandson somersaults--crescendo, autumn wind, gavel falling and so on, until the poem reaches the marvelously mundane-sublime place where "dogs sing the pressure of dawn." --Elena Karina Byrne



Second Place
First Frost
by Christopher T. George
FreeWrights Peer Review


A last ochre magnolia leaf twitches
like the index finger of a dying man;

under the ginkgo, yellow leaves spread
& all the birds are in motion, swooping,

diving: robins, starlings, cardinals,
a brace of cheeky blue jays—o one vaults

into the magnolia like a trapeze
artiste and devours a bud.


"First Frost" is a Buddhist-like, automatopoetic polaroid view of nature, targeting our vulnerability of perennial-impermanence where a magnolia leaf "twitches like the index finger of a dying man." The use of assonance and subtle end rhyme keep the poem beautifully close-fisted, bud-like, ready to be devoured. --Elena Karina Byrne



Third Place
Dinner With the Ghost of Rilke
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review

Come here, to the candlelight.
I’m not afraid to look on the dead.

I was confused by snakes looping
around your neck, the little girl voice that you had
to swallow in order to please your mother. I told you
as you twirled a red flag to draw away the slathering

wolves that you would never disappoint me.
The crumbling bridge where we said our goodbyes
all those years ago must even now contain
the echoes of our voices sleeping in its seams.

How many inexhaustible nights did I stay awake
to answer your letters? You asked me to steal something
risky, something I couldn’t take back across the street.

Greedy for praise I filled my pockets with
sugar. Outside the café the night becomes a snow globe.
Held in your gaze, winter takes me back.


"Come here" the beginning of "Dinner With the Ghost of Rilke" commands. Because of the strength of diction, we follow this instruction and immediately become participatory, complicit observers. Rilke's "necessary irrepressible... definitive utterance" colors the voice that is swallowed, a presence, nevertheless, heavy as two pockets full of sugar. --Elena Karina Byrne



Honorable Mentions
Taste Buds of Children and Mock Adults
by Thane Zander
Blueline


We bleed on pavements decorated in childish flowers,
discharge our vehemence in toilet bowls swallowing
large tracts of shit, shyte, shovel it out and spread
onto a garden decorated with summers hues,

placate the dandelion as it swims aloft on wispy winds,
seeking Monarch Butterflies to caress in death throes,
excrete your discontentment on the laps of executives
when the family savings invested in stocks, tumble

like a dryer on spin cycle, the cold cycle reserved
for her husbands dying corduroys, the colour sticking
to off white socks and travel brochures from a back pocket,
ready to fly first class with crumpled shirts and dungarees

wearing thin around the butt, years of sitting at a computer
and conversing to faceless names, except the ones that lie
when they post an avatar of indifference and cheek, swallow
the last Rhubarb sandwich on a plate filled with regret and woes

leftover like a dying man's left testicle after an operation to cure
the cancer of his family passed down to him, his brother long dead
and buried in another garden setting, flowers in pots and agee jars
no lid required, the dried arrangement last longer in summer's sun,

We eat curdled milk, drink dipped honey crusties, pass the jam
so youngun's can leave a bloody trail on the white tablecloth,
and the ants and bees can leave a tell tale sign of their visit,

my wife said she could smell ants,
me; I avoid bees like the plague.



Talking Terror
by Sachi Nag
The Writer's Block


On our way to Fundy City in ten
inches of snow, a familiar cab driver
asked me if I lost anyone in those sixty
hours of Mumbai.

We couldn’t take our eyes off
the Christmas lights, and the carols
on the airwaves, so haunting, we were feeling
kinship in the gravy of victimhood,

when the hardened ice beneath the slush
stunned the front tyres, and we skidded
rear-ending a parked van and spun
over the edge into a pile of snow

from last year. Strangers stopped by
with shovels and hooks, powering us out.
We dusted jackets, shook hands;
restarted, slow, almost like roadkill,

eyes riveted along the routine way -
now as sinuous as a strange
white feathered boa - the cabbie's sure hands
shaking at the wheel.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for November 2009
Judge Majid Naficy
Congratulations!

First Place
Certain in my Immortality - 1947
by Alice Folkart
Blueline


The park public pool, huge and blue,
even in polio season my favorite place,
everyone taking the same risks equally,
and the wise lifeguards, maybe sixteen at best
shouted, little girl, little girl, get back to the shallow end.

We couldn’t see the polio germs in the blue water,
nor clinging to our sun-reddened backs,
nor beaded on our eyelashes, nor between our little toes,
so we paid no mind to the calls of ‘little girl, little girl,’
and went on swimming where the water was darker blue.

Maybe those polio germs got some of those kids,
maybe the blond boys with freckles on their noses,
the ones who had water fights at the other end of the pool,
the ones who also didn’t listen to the life guards’ shouts
of, “Hey, guys, knock it off! No water fights.

Maybe those polio germs got the fat lady in the flower-petal swim cap,
or the old man with the belly as big as a whole baby pig,
or the skinny old woman, all angles like an erector set,
but they didn’t get me and they didn’t get the life guards
and I swam every day that summer, certain in my immortality.


"Polio is associated with water. Remember FDR. While sailing in Canadian territory in 1921, he fell into the water. After getting on board he felt a chill, and in two days, was paralyzed from the waist down. The narrator's memory belongs to 1947, when the polio vaccine was not yet available. Now that swine flu is circulating, there is one more reason to relate to this beautiful and meaningful poem. Perhaps the poet is being ironic, because in spite of imminent danger, she speaks of a sense of immortality. Nevertheless, the polio situation is similar to any other risk-taking experience that we face in life. We usually cross our fingers, hope for the best, and assume that the misfortune will not fall upon ourselves." --Majid Naficy



Second Place
String theory (Shrodinger’s coffin)
by Jessica Haynes
Moontown Cafe


breathe
in and out,
ribs up and ribs down
like a flexible cage

It’s strange,
at least I think,
how many pretty phrases
English has
for ”dead”.

so maybe
if string theory can be trusted
(my heart on a broken thread)
if I never see you lying there
(skin like lilies after frost
hands like too soft marble)
maybe
if I never hear the words
(passed away, to a better place
so sorry, such a tragedy)

maybe I can bring you back;
if I can only
choose
which thread to follow
which one to tug
like yarn in a labyrinth
I’ll string it
through the darkness
so you can follow it home.


"One does not have to know the "string theory" as a mathematical theory for describing the properties of fundamental particles or Erwin Schrodinger, the Austrian physicist, in order to enjoy this touching and whimsical poem. Our poet approaches the question of "death" similar to the views of my countryman Omar Khayyam, with the difference that Khayyam sees the fate as a puppeteer and our poet as a modern physicist. The ending is especially playful, when the poet wants to shake a string through which the deceased can find his way back home." --Majid Naficy



Third Place
Without salt
by Sarah J. Sloat
Desert Moon Review


Rorschach of the laundry sack –

I pinch your bottom and some see
the long maw of the crocodile
in a shadow play

or a primitive insect, a locust,
maybe a mother who won’t let go.

Little intimate of the bedclothes,
into your muzzle go rags
and nightgowns, trappings and briefs,

gnawed but not pierced,
not discussed, not disclosed.

Could you speak, your voice
might be twang or chirp, but
you come from the church that touts

shut your trap as first commandment,
a monk’s tongue sworn to silence.

When your joint snaps,
when it rejects resting ajar, all
that is conjured is the clack

of a castanet, terse, reluctant,
a foot stamped to discourage dance.

Second cousin to the mousetrap,
tense and cunning as a Gemini,
you’re yin/yang with an oral fixation

though upside down
on the clothesline, your silhouette

reveals the inverse,
a contraption that needs both
to take in and keep,

the house’s clampdown,
the control freak.


"'Rorschach' is a psychology test named after Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychologist, who showed his subjects standard inkblots to analyze their interpretations. When I read this well-crafted poem for the first time, I did not know of Rorschach, and yet I felt that the clothespin described in this poem is itself being psycho-analyzed." --Majid Naficy




Honorable Mention

‘Appy ‘Our
by Stuart Ryder
The Poets' Graves


A week an’ a day
shreddin’ me soles
ont’ Pennine Way.
Back int’ town,

straight tut’ pub:
order some rolls –
“Good ‘onest grub”.
Pints, get ‘em down!

Well-oiled, me legs lollin’,
Ah lounged, me mind mullin’
o’r background cha’ –
simple but good n tha’…

then our fittie barmaid with flut’rin’
eyes an’ ‘uge tits says Ey-oh Stu!
Stands o’r me wicked like, but’rin’
bread an’ Ah risk a kiss. She does, too.

Pink slabs of ‘am wi’ a garlic mayo.
An’ when she gives me a refill,
a golden sunbeam glances off me ‘ead.