IBPC WINNING POEMS in 2007, Congratulations! Options

[AMETHYST]

IBPC WINNING POEMS FOR DECEMBER 2006
Judge David Kirby

First Place:

A Poem That Thinks It Has Joined a Circus
by Liz Gallagher
Inside the Writer's Studio

A handkerchief is not an emotional hold-all.
A cup of tea does not eradicate all-smothering sensations.
A hands-on approach is not the same as a hand-on-a-shoulder
willing a chin to lift and an upper lip to stiffen.
A forehead resting on fingers does not imply that the grains
of sand in an hourglass have filtered through.
A set of eyes staring into space is not an indictment that the sun
came crashing down in the middle of the night.
A sigh that causes trembling and wobbly knees should be
henceforth and without warning trapped in a bell jar and retrained
to come out tinkling ivories with every gasp.
A poem trying to turn a sad feeling on its head does not constitute
a real poem, it is a can-can poem dancing on a pin-head
and walking a tight-rope with arms pressed tightly by its sides.



Judges Comments:

While some critics will tell you that movies about movies or plays about plays are self-involved and decadent, sometimes I feel as though poems about poems are the only ones worth writing. Why? Because, at the moment of "getting it," and this applies to the moment of reading the poem as well as writing it, there is no more electric charge than that which comes with seeing a poem strut its stuff. Of course, part of the poem's and the poet's and the reader's achievement is that none of these three essential elements of the artistic experience knows exactly how that experience works. Just as the tightrope walker has to wobble on the wire, so the poem has to shake and tremble in order to startle and amaze as much as this one does. --David Kirby




Second Place:

There Once Was a Daughter Who Lived in His Shoe
by Laurel K. Dodge
The Writer's Block

In the unmade bed, she had no legs.
The fruit that her mouth coveted

was bruised, the milk in the dark
refrigerator, watery and blue,

the bowl in the barren cupboard, cracked
and empty. Her legs were watery

and blue, her mouth unmade and bruised.
She was dark and cracked and empty.

She was covetous and blue.
She was barren. She had no fruit.

She was a cupboard, a bowl,
a refrigerator that could not be filled.

She was a bed no body slept in.
The leash waited, coiled in the dim hall.

The dog was dead, the birches, bark peeling,
bent; the hill she once scaled, slippery.

She was the dimness, the coil, the wait.
She was the peeling and the impossible

ascent. The dog was dad; she had no legs.
The dad was dead. She was unmade.



Judges Comments:

Is there anyone breathing who does not love fairy tales? The poet Miller Williams says that you ought to be able to explain any poem to a six year-old, and fairy tales do that for you. There's the surface story for the child in us all, but for you adult readers out there, there are elements reminding you that life is not all beautiful princesses and knights in shining armor. There are depths in this poem, disturbing ones: we look closely, we turn away for fear of seeing too much, and then, because of the poet's power to mesmerize, we find that we can't help looking again. --David Kirby


Third Place:

Escorting a Child Offender to a Wake
by Derek Spanfelner
The Critical Poet

Her body is crumpled plastic laid flat,
complexion waxy. Crow's feet mark
the tendencies of her nature. Her grandson,
my ward, tells me of milk and cookies,
the simple tenets she upheld, unquestioned kindnesses.
He wrote a poem about it Mom will read in eulogy.

We meet the rest outside, who greet each other
(hard-shelled and sentimental alike)
in the camaraderie of grief. This child,
who has shown younger cousins who is boss
by stripping their underwear and ignoring their pleas,
is a puffy-eyed prize in the open arms of his mother.
"My oldest (of eight)," she beams to obscure relatives.

The uncle auctions salvaged cars. Knuckles having
earned their gold, he asks questions as one acquainted
with the ease of plain answers. He offers money because
"he's a good kid at heart, always the first to help out."

I can't tell him how the boy put his hands around
their necks and threatened to kill them if they told.
Instead, I note more auspicious behavior, for the man
expects to run the value of therapy
through his calloused fingers and know
the knot will hold. I cannot tell him

that no boy is a convertible. That if a dent
could be smoothed, another is bound to surface;
that where I work, no one is ever fixed.



Judges Comments:

I'll add this poem to my list as I complete my stint as judge by saying that it, like so many others, could have easily been my first choice. This is a poem that I don't understand, though I offer my lack of comprehension as a supreme compliment. What I want to say is that this poem, like a lot of the many I have read during my time as judge, has what I call a meaningful ambiguity to it, a scary, hypnotic power which lets me know instantly that I'll be reading it again and again and getting more out of it each time. A thriller only works if the audience is slightly behind the detective's perceptions; if you know who done it from the beginning or if you never find out, you'll be disappointed, but if you're poised to shout "Aha!" a few seconds after the mystery's revealed, well, that's art, folks. I'm confident that that's what this poem is doing and will continue to do for me. That's how poetry works. --David Kirby





Honorable Mentions:

Beans (Curgina)
by Denise Ward
Lit With Kick!

September came like winter's
ailing child but
left us
viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was
always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every
doctored moment lied. You lie with
orphans' parents, long
reviled.

As close as coppers, yellow beans still
line Mapocho's banks. It
leads them to the sea;
entwined on rocks and saplings, each
new vine recalls that
dawn in 1973 when
every choking, bastard weed grew wild.




Solitude
by Cherryl E. Garner
South Carolina Writer's Workshop

There is small art in solitude.
It shakes sometimes like random shock,

as though one spot explains the arc
or one fine point defines the line.

There is no talk when none's received,
when simple converse meets no mark,

as though the circle rolls the ball,
as though the line supports the box.

There is no black like night assigned
to pounding chest and clenched, cold heart,

as though the sphere explains the sky,
as though void space can break the fall,

when locking shut in one timeframe,
some voodoo shimmies out one name.




Beach
by Millard R. Howington
South Carolina Writer's Workshop

I liked to jog to
the pier my one day off and have
breakfast, gazing at an ocean
through salt stained windows.
There was a bar nearby, mainly
deserted in the off season and
I'd stop in, enjoy a brewski, flirt
a little with the waitress there;
she loved to draw my attention
to the rare big busted patron and
ask me if I knew how they got
that way. On the slow walk back
to my summer rate motel, I skirted
water's edge and wondered just
how long that little sandpiper
with the one leg was going to last.

[AMETHYST]

Winning Poems for March 2007
Judge Pascale Petit

The Bird Artists
by Laurie Byro
About Poetry Forum

When my skin no longer fits, I carry a bag of bones
to the edge of the ocean. I steal the breath from a gull.
On the beach a mother bends to help a young boy
bundle up a baby cormorant. I watch as they cradle it,

hold a wing into the air and fling it eastward.
I thought you could teach me how to fly. I made you
out of sand dunes and red clay. My husband sleeps.
I conjure up you, Merwin, and you, Merlin.

Palm trees and ancient words, a black cauldron
of seawater and fire. You spread the fan of the cormorant's
wing and arrange your pigments and brushes, stroke

each feather with woodland brown or green.
I feel my skin begin to loosen. I pick away the lice,
curl back the sclerotic welt of paint.



First Place Judge's Commentary
The Bird Artists
by Laurie Byro
About Poetry Forum

"The Bird Artists" is poetry as spell or charm, as container and transformer. It begins and ends with a skin: "when my skin no longer fits" to "I feel my skin begin to loosen... curl back the sclerotic welt of paint." In between there's a body that I can't quite pin down: a bag of bones, a baby cormorant, a gull's breath, sand dunes and red clay, seawater and fire, pigments and brushes are gathered as ingredients for the "black cauldron" of the poem. Merwin is conjured to work magic for it, (which brings to my mind W.S. Merwin), and Merlin the wizard. By the last line human skin has become painted feathers. Every line is weighted with a surprising image or action. Even though the effect is mythic, there's a precise highly wrought feel to this poem. Not a word or space is wasted. Vulnerable, visceral and ethereal, it lingers in the imagination and draws me back to marvel at its compact power. --Pascale Petit


Second Place
Omen
by Dave Rowley
Inside the Writer's Studio


This morning an omen: the blue jay's stiffening
legs receive an open sky. Sad, like a blue flame
cradling a teaspoon, or the tap-tap-tapping
on a tenuous vein in a break-down motel.
Even the wallpaper peels away
from the cloying stories that stink this room
like rats who've crawled between the walls
and died. Now it's summer and their ghosts
thicken and swell in your throat. The sting of steel
is mirror-flashed and plunging, close your eyes
to hear its sinuous song. Close your humming eyes
and wait, it's close and warm, like morning singing
and the walls become blue-feather filled
quilts as your legs fall away and up into the sky.



Second Place Judge's Commentary
Omen
by Dave Rowley
Inside the Writer's Studio

Second place goes to another fine "bird" poem, also tautly constructed and packed with organic, chiming imagery. A blue jay's legs embracing the sky metamorphose into blue flames around a teaspoon, then into a room with blue-feather quilted walls. The images vibrate against each other; the language is trance-like, allowing the blue images to burgeon and transmute in semi-abstract motion. Synaesthetic phrases such as "their ghosts / thicken and swell in your throat," "close your humming eyes" and "it's close and warm, like morning singing" have a hypnotic effect, lulling the reader over the transitions and merging the triple image of blue jay/ blue flame/ quilt walls seamlessly. --Pascale Petit


Third Place
Show but Never Tell
by Brenda Levy Tate
Pen Shells


In the Guller house, terrible things
were done to all the children.
I once lived around the corner, down
a mud road where the youngest
son sometimes walked. His name
was Charlie and I knew something
had to be wrong with his brain.
Nice ponies, he'd tell me, staring
past the edge of his own boyhood.
Ay-uh, them's real nice. He'd grin
so wide I could count every one
of his tumbledown grey teeth.
He was eleven then, and growing.

In the Guller house, brothers, cousins
and uncles didn't wait for the girls
to get their periods. None of them
stayed virgins much past five or six.
Except for the cripple, who had stumps
for legs and arms. They used to park
her on the step just to get some sun,
like a plant kept too long in shadows.
Neighbors said she didn't mind, she was
a vegetable. I had no opinion on that.

In the Guller house, they ate cow-corn
stolen from a field across the highway.
The farmer hooted and slapped
his knee, because they were filching
his cattle-food and he figured it
was funny. I never saw any garden
in their scraped-raw yard. Battered
cars buried the lawn, and junk trucks
made fences. But the social services
and public health station wagons shone
in the dust. So did the small daughters.

In the Guller house, a nurse hesitated
at the threshold with her medicine kit,
while Charlie's father was breeding one
of his nieces on the kitchen floor. Hold on;
I ain't done yet! he grunted, and finished.
The nurse told everybody, but this was
the 1970s. Incest was just a family affair,
except for the babies. Every once in awhile,
they got taken away. Charlie became
a man--with two kids by his sister--
before a Guller finally screamed, loud
enough to disturb the sweet community.
She was thirteen. They tried to shut her up.
By then I'd moved to another county.

In the Guller house, two hundred years
lie black as a dirty stove. The rape-
room is gone: part of a chicken coop.
I suppose the cripple died; Charlie
and his kin should still be in prison,
although probably they're not.
The laughing farmer's dead, too. Lost
children drift in the convenient dark,
names without faces, because it's easier
for the rest of us. Good people still
drive past the ruin, shop and work
and age. Harsh January air cuts
across the South Mountain and sandblasts
an empty driveway--the same wind
that abrades me now. But I've never
been hard-blown open, a broken door,
a Guller child.



Third Place Judge's Commentary
Show but Never Tell
by Brenda Levy Tate
Pen Shells

This is more than a narrative poem telling us a shocking family tale. It's hard to write convincingly about child abuse especially from an outsider's perspective, but the narrator's tone here is just right, a tactful observer who ends by describing him or herself through images, as someone who's "never / been hard-blown open, a broken door." It's this ending that enriches the poem, so that the final draught blows back up through the whole story like the wind in Munch's The Scream. The language is low-key and evenly paced in its steady recounting of the horrors of the Guller house. Simple, stark statements such as "two hundred years / lie black as a dirty stove" and "battered /cars buried the lawn" paint a vivid picture of the place. What shocks is the calm way we're shown how commonplace the sexual abuse was, so much so that visiting nurses would stumble upon it as they went about their work. The narrator is abraded by the sandblasting wind of memory and what has been witnessed but does not over-dramatise the facts. --Pascale Petit

Honorable Mentions

Caisa Thorbjornsdotter
by Jana Bouma
Wild Poetry Forum

I've known the small red farmhouse,
the dear blue curtains and the white china,
the husband behind the oxen on the rocky hillside,
the patch of oats beside the tall pines.
I've known the forest alive with skogsra and wight,
trolls and huldre-folk, the hymns in the small church.
I've known the wash day and the birthing day,
the son gone off to the city, the iron crosses,
each with its name, beside the small mounds.
I've known the long journey, sick with fever,
the crowded passage, the strange new city,
the setting out by lake and river and wagon,
arriving at this place that stretches on forever,
a land of nothing, no tomte or myling
to murmur in the night, no neighbor, no fencepost.
This land did not turn easy to the plow,
but I planted myself here among the tall grasses.
The grasses' deep roots, they welcomed me.

*skogsra, wight, trolls, huldre-folk, tomte, myling: creatures in
Scandinavian folklore
Thorbjornsdotter: daughter of Thorbjorn


Venetian Notes
by Adam Elgar
Inside the Writer's Studio

Cannaregio

It's this way in, an umbilicus through a living monument
to everything that long ago mislaid its century, and stands
now on the sufferance of time, a backdrop to the boat's
raucous trance, its grunt and shudder as it strikes the Campo
wall, our shock in finding that the tunnelled waterways
and pox-peeled facades are not illusions after all. This
is the unmoving dance of brick and stone on ether.

Santa Croce

This is the capital of claustrophobia
where liquid alleyways drown light
in pungent green, steep furtive passages
conspire along their dark cammin, and slip us
through the city's corseted heart.
One humpy bridge will take us only to the next,
our dread and fascination mounting
till the pesceria like a sudden tide
grants us the gift of openness,
the sea in boxes on an ice-slicked floor,
fish gilded, rosy, silver, veined with blue,
beside a flaunt of sucking discs in stars
and jointed creatures trying not to die.
Our hearts' tides make no sense of this.

Dorsoduro

Our eyes stream at the dazzle on the Zattere.
Here the world's light tightens to a smack,
there's no escape from blue except returning
through the narrow calli where the shadows
sulk in loyalty to winter.
This taut geometry discharges us at last
to lunch in kinder light subdued by stone.
The weary curve of Campo Santa Margherita
drinks, as we do our Friuli, the declining sun.


The Box Which is Myth
by S. Jason Fraley
Inside the Writer's Studio
For each brother, the box contains Agamemnon's skull, a collection
of precious stones, and Dad's old Playboys, respectively. All their stories: how each made love for the first time while it was in the room, how it survived as their parent's house burned. The slight indention where a thief's head landed when clubbed with a trophy. Not a mildew stain. No, a glow.

* * *

They arrive at Dad's birthday party. In the corner--the box covered with a decorative table cloth. Someone puts a red plastic cup on it. When the two oldest brothers go outside to bring in extra bags of ice, the youngest takes the box, sneaks into the laundry room. He slices it open with his pocket knife. An explosion of flannel shirts.

* * *

The box is meticulously taped. The lead detective stretches latex gloves over his hands, drops the knife into a plastic bag. Fingerprint dust floats. Handcuffed to chairs, the brothers share stories. One insists he stole the box from behind the museum when a Greek exhibit traveled through town. The other says that when it is time to retire, he will live as he has always dreamed.


Takes your breath
by Kathleen Vibbert
Pen Shells

We settle in close like apples in a round bowl,
while the moon brushes off bits of light as awkward;
you remove the white shirt with button down collar.

And in between split spheres,
the hairs on your neck become soft-wheat.
You find your way through my breasts.
Hands separate dusks from the corners
of our mouths-
some colors enter and never leave - -
the world knows how to cool and warm,
which scars never sleep and which voices say yes.

The world knows when and how to dress a peach--
and how the thistle slowly takes away your breath.