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> IBPC Winning Poems, 2010, Congratulations Poets!
Cleo_Serapis
post Jan 26 10, 18:38
Post #1


Mosaic Master
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Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for January, 2010
Judges Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Congratulations!


First Place
Eureka Springs
by Jude Goodwin
The Waters



Now that’s a big Jesus
and it’s not how I know him at all.
Imagine living under someone’s father
image like that, looks like
he’s blocking the door. “I do this
for you, my son.” Look mister,
I’m hankering for East. I’ve done
the Berlin Wall slab, the Liberty
replica, time’s come for passing
the great white milk carton. The real
Jesus never grew old and he was skinny.
I held him once, in college. I could feel
his ribs. His heart hammered
like a ruby-throated hummingbird,
I felt the wind from his wings
for years. This big theme park
messiah, unrevolving and without
an elevator, this isn’t Jesus.
It’s his body guard. It’s the man
blocking the tunnel down
to the bomb shelters. It’s the guy
who won’t let you into the ER
to watch your mother die. It’s the cop
who holds you back on the grass
as your friends and ex-wife move
all your belongings out of the house
and into a cube van, it’s the shape
you make on the cellar floor
where you wait for the end.
The real Jesus played guitar,
bending his body around the music
like a gourd. His skin was brown
and smelled of cinnamon.



Eureka Springs is a glorious re-envisioning of the famous 2 million pound mortar and steel statue of Jesus of the Ozarks. We're enamored of the way this poem takes the familiar image of Jesus, welcoming arms outstretched, and transforms the gesture to reveal our more earthly and unholy fathers, though in the end, returns the messiah to a humble and ultimately human figure. --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Second Place
Snow
by Judy Swann
The Waters



It is a time that says enough, hush.
If we’re lucky, no car will groan past into the glove of our silence.
Though there are schools and businesses, we will not leave home.
Though there is electricity stored in batteries and a power grid and running water, we lay modestly under our blankets.
Though there are apples and kolatchen and bacon, though there is cabbage, we are not hungry.

Life holds still, like a painting or a mountain.



"Snow" is a small, quiet poem that becomes larger and larger as it progresses, climbing gracefully upwards into its final powerful image. We're especially taken with the syntax and simplicity of this piece. --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Third Place
Tiger, Tiger
by Mitchell Geller
Desert Moon Review



(With profound apologies to William Blake)

Tiger, Tiger, driving right
into the tree that fateful night;
how indignant was thy spouse
to send thee fleeing from thy house?

Charming children, winsome wife,
fortune to enrich thy life.
Can a trull, however sultry
force thee into thine adult’ry?

In what distant bleak terrain
hid what passes for thy brain?
Did the itch within thy loins
make thee pay for love with coins?

Hero of that long walk, spoiled,
how didst thou become embroiled
with these sluttish, venal sirens,
so removed from tees and irons?

Art thou sinful? Art thou daft?
Are the balls and wood and shaft
that fill thy mind and heart and eyes
not the ones that earn a prize?

Tiger! Tiger! See thy pastor,
or a shrink, thy lust to master.
In thy quest for venery
did any bimbo NOT make thee?



Who can resist this occasional poem about the great golf pro lately in the news for his flagrant peccadillos? A clever, deft, mini tour de force-- the informal language playing against rigors of form-- this is a quirky poem of questions that continues to surprise and delight. --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux




Honorable Mentions

Wig
by Michael Harty
Wild Poetry Forum



She lay dead-white and perfect
blanketed in paint and lilies. Incense died
around our ankles. The hair, stiff
with spray, too quiet to be her own.
Never mind the little priest, what could he know
of her falls and rises, of dime dances
and lucky breaks, mink-wrapped evenings
in Columbus Circle, New Year’s canapes
on the Queen Mary. The shining lies
of tuxedoed men, the dead faithlessness
of diamonds. High life in the Loop, low life
a block from Venice Beach. How to put
twelve years of dents in the same Cadillac.
How one enunciates while holding
one’s fourth manhattan of the afternoon.

Yes, it was fate or serendipity
when the late-arriving nephew staggered
into the wreath from the Library Guild,
knocking it into the coffin,
which tipped the wig over her eyes
and smeared her lipstick for the last time.
Now that was more like it. Finally
we could say goodbye.



Takazumi
by Bren Lyons
criticalpoet.org



I sit awfully upright, silent
in my Japanese room: tatami mats,
the walls squared away
the hanging scroll.
Don’t forget the garbage,
the wife trills out and the door
clicks shut: she is away to work.
I pull out the shining sword
and lay it upon my lap,
sharp as a bastard,
you could shave with this fucker.
Breathe in, breathe out,
become Japanese.
I stare at the scroll,
trying to make out the Kanji,
this looks like “world” and “within”
and then there’s a load of squiggly pigeonshit
and then the sirens kick in,
the ambulances, dragging heartsore
victims to clapped-out hospitals.
I stare some more at the scroll.
Stare long enough and you might learn something.
I like this summer kimono,
it allows you to scratch your balls
comfortably, no need for zips or retainers
and the squirrels, they run about
in the trees, beyond the window,
they run about in the piece of the wood
where we had to bury poor fuckin Paul.
They haven’t found him yet; chances are
they never will. The good thing about this room
is that it has no mirrors. I mean to say,
you don’t need to look at yourself. Ever.



Post Apocalypse in Polo Park
by Don Schaeffer
Pen Shells



The end of the world
comes with a grumble
and small fires
licking at the trees;

but the people die
at the hands of one another.
The cold comes from
failure of mercy,
not the winter.

That’s why the bus trip home
is magnified. Those icey
lights which subtract the color
and the deep Winter panic
of the Winnipeg cold.

I’m a deeply lonely man
so I just understand.
I want the voice
of a friend in the night.


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Mar 1 10, 18:45
Post #2


Mosaic Master
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Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for February, 2010
Judges Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Congratulations!


First Place
What
by Jude Goodwin
The Waters



if each of the world’s 6 billion people
wrote one poem today
on a single folded sheet
and stapled it each to the other’s,
end to end. The paper chain would reach
around the world twenty-one
thousand times. Earth, the tenement,
with six billion poems flapping
like bedsheets in the air
above our streets, some blood
marked, some greyed
by the smoke from our frankfurter
stands, most white
like belly feathers and we all
have to look up. Is it time
to cut the poetry loose? The news
papers cry and the people
pull out their scissors.
The poems launch themselves
upward, it takes only half of them
to link humanity to the moon, the rest
carry on past,. We watch
with our telescopes
and iPhones until they are gone.
Well that’s that then isn’t it ?
the poets of the world
might say. They’ve known all along,
about the numbers -



We hear this kind of calculation used everywhere today: If you lined up all the polystyrene foam cups made in just one day, they would circle the earth. If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 1994 were laid end to end, they'd reach the moon and half way back to earth. Every day, Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York and back again. (Not a bad idea, if you put a bullet train in that pipe.) This poem uses the same conceit, but for poetic purposes, making a paper chain of poems strung like a clothesline above the tenement of the earth. It's a poem about poetry, but also about humanity and art, struck through with humor, and ending with a nod to reality. --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Second Place
A Question of Nakedness
by Melanie Firth
Wild Poetry Forum



fragment by fragment, on a small scale,
by successive developments, cellularly,
like a laborious mosaic. - Anais Nin


Nips, lips and a chasm of whiteness.
A mark they call ‘birth’. Imperfection
that wants to love itself. All that stand-alone.
The great crowding physicality. How flesh
recalls action, but scars over the cost.
The questions flesh fold on, give rise to.
Do I turn you on? Turn on you? Hurt
when I press here. Here? The thigh’s mole,
will it answer to melanoma, to Melanie?

How SP30+ became a process of affection,
cotton sucking on a figurative field
of follicles and sweat. The occasional
horror of a deep metaphorical wound
or otherwise and the smug nature
of paper cuts. Beauty versus scars.
Natural regeneration v.s. stocking-up
on anti-aging products.

All the recesses I fear and my inability
to say ‘hole’ around your arousal.
Pinkness and rawness (that relationship).
The take-it-in-your-stride concept
of disposal, birth and of f—ing.
The body’s gumption. How it breaks
on time, indulgence and self-harm.
The egging-on of the virile seed.

Regret for the wounded animal
who leaves me bloodless, but fools me
into power. The lack of cushioning
on shoulder blade, knee and elbow
fixtures. The exasperation of a slow
scab and the fruitless study of palms.
The distrustfulness of wrists.

How I cannot really slander
or comprehend my nakedness at all.



We liked this poem for its generosity to the aging body in all its guises, its scars and scabs and folds, its furrows and deadly moles. We also like the innovative use of language and syntax: "The body's gumption. How it breaks/ on time, indulgence and self-harm./The egging-on of the virile seed." --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Third Place
Absence of Detail
by Debbie Calverley
criticalpoet.org



Today there is nothing to write
serious or otherwise, the wind blows.
Ridiculous to sublime the snow falls
scoops of vanilla ice without the cream.
Around the room’s throat, dark hands
of night close, while candles wax
their poetics onto tabletops, the cat’s
silhouette looms in the hallway
her tail a taper, the colour of flame.

The round of moon reminds me of a shape
his head cradled against a black cushion -
Tonight there is nothing to write.



This poem moves from image to image, from scoops of ice cream to the dark hands of night, from the flame of a cat's tail to a surprising use of that old standby, the moon. Also a poem about poetry, it becomes a poem in spite of the poet's most common complaint. --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Honorable Mentions

Ars Poetica #7
by Tim Blighton
Desert Moon Review



The unraveling is slow: under red cellophane, black
birds weave around themselves; punctuation
strung together without words; the patterns

dissolve into street lamps and bug zappers,
stuttering and angry ghosts
trapped in their own vaults. Dusk,

a deep sealing breath, brings a bouquet
of bubbles, stars and debris to the surface. Because,
poetry is any quiet night

translated by those who have only hammers and bells:
every firefly strung through the dandelion seed
like fallen Christmas lights; every sparrow dissolved

into a bat, like a bicycler signaling; every cicada
returning from the industry of mating to lay
its labor inside thinly-cut wood: over

and over, the batches will nestle in the ink of sleep, until
years later—after each creator is consumed,
perhaps, by a bird made flesh from the night—small

tunnels will burst open, nymphs rise
out, crawl into undergrowth whose roots
they’ve fed upon for years, and molt into song.



O be Joyful
by Judy Swann
The Waters



That July, rectangular, he crept backwards.
He loved the mats of purslane on August
earth, where he lay his face,

and Nikka, the German Shepard,
not mutual, and by December with tin
ear, burbled to the gamelon.

At three, suddenly verbal, he claimed
to love me 92 olds and 47 pounds.
I love you he said, 32 - 14 - 7 hours.

He loved my eye and my other eye,
loved his father’s lymphoma’s nodes,
kissed them and said, Now we’re set.

I taught him to say Je t’adore,
which he pronounced “Such a Joe.”
Don’t go, he told me, Such a Joe, Mother.



Triolet on a Line by Billy Collins
by Antonia Clark
The Waters



How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death.
– from “The First Night”

How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death.
How wordlessly we tremble or embrace
the thought of it, knowing we will give up breath,
language, selfhood in the face of death.
And, even then, I won’t pretend that faith
will save us. This life is all we know of grace.
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death
How wordlessly we tremble or embrace.


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Mar 28 10, 20:00
Post #3


Mosaic Master
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Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for March, 2010
Judges Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Congratulations!


First Place
Eden in Winter
by Russel Smith
The Write Idea



In a downtown park I find
a marble Eve with broken hands and feet
lying awake by a sleeping man,
where he had carried her.

Unconscious, still he keeps her
among the frost-bit weeds,
a crippled captive
to oversee his wretchedness.

New life sings in the branches,
rattles the clinging leaves,
chases the hard snow crunching
sweet as halvah, beneath my feet.

Each lengthening day the sun
climbs higher over us.
I circle here; I listen
to her muted voice.

She tells me we are naked,
lacking even skins of animals,
and having eaten of the tree of life,
we could live forever.



We are enamored of the city scene drawn here, the homeless man and his marble Eve, the "frost-bit weeds". The idea that these difficult surroundings can be somehow Edenesque. A mysterious poem that harkens back to the garden where all is naked and broken. --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Second Place
nettles riff nettles the big tree
by Steve Parker
criticalpoet.org



there at the confluence of radiators the boy sings

I knew you when you were small
you remember back in the old days
a father from outside swinging
a man with a glider who said now then

now then what? someone they said did homosex stuff
in a cinema after chopping nettles all day
this was a betrayal of his wife/mother
all day this was a betrayal

the boy was in bed with biscuits
a torch
the cold the deep cold

by the age of eight I was inured to cold
I can take cold like I can take rejection
warmth I see as too much frivolous politics

ancestral shame I can’t help your Grandfather
who in a laudanum frenzy
maybe it is not right to speak of the favourite goat
whose spirit appeared over and over
in the guise of a maiden
always at dusk clutching a glass
of chartreuse asking in chitin

to be served in the hemispherical bread oven
where the bones were found behind the wall broken

later his girlfriends found these discoveries challenging
uh uh uh uh uh she would say from her book
he held so avid at night beneath the blankets
in the torchlight uh uh uh uh uh he
would say back in English Naval umaphore

tomorrow both of them scything nettles in the old garden
at each other scarcely looking



A fractured narrative wherein the reader is moved through a series of arresting images, back towards an “ancestral shame”. The poem skips its frenetic way through politics and sex and memory, using a range of voices, all of them tied together through the starkly powerful scything of nettles." --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Third Place
Everything will be permitted, nothing will be desired
by Laura Ring
Wild Poetry Forum



We abandoned our bodies not long
after the millennium. Even the memory
was hateful at first — wet, crabwise things,

animalcules in a giant jizz wad rushing to fertilize
the Great Mother. Absurd lips, genitals,
rounded skulls like the dumb heads of sperm.

Reproduction a horror of chance, like reaching
blind into a grab bag for gametes.
We had cures for everything: cancer,

heart disease. We lived too long, witnessed
the recalculation of risk. Watched the ordinary –
cotton, moonlight — turn deadly. There were
so many ways to die
. In time

our absent bodies grew benign,
the way vanished things become lovable.
Laudanum. Castor oil. We shake

our heads at the big-head bipeds
that wander our history like hi-wheels
and wagons; tote their leaks
and swellings in the hapless past.

A mere century makes of our bodies
a Golden Age. We doubt the measure
of our bloodless geometry, press
the old timers for stories of flesh:

They say our fingers made trails in the water;
and the pizza cheese burned our mouths. They say
sometimes our bare legs would stick to the back seats of cars.



This poem’s finely drawn map of the "bloodless" future makes us especially appreciate the last three lines that bring us back to the present, back into our living bodies: fingers, mouths, legs. --Joseph Millar & Dorianne Laux



Honorable Mentions

Lot
by Richard Moorhead
Wild Poetry Forum



I. Bible Story

Someone’s wife, no - husband,
dreaming of a soup
to dip the spouse in.
The years taste like her
or cream of artichoke
with a little lick of sin.

II. Readied for Sale

How casually you sell my mistakes
to recipients of saleable complaints, tie
an off-white luggage tag to my big toe,
ready me for auction. I despise that

but I love the thickness of the paper
and the tag’s hole protector -
a sticker like a polo mint.
I love its old fashionedness.

III. That’s your lot

It’s not what you have,
but the end of what you have.
It is not who you are, but the end
of who you are. I am reluctant

to accept it, like the moment
when you move house.
Close the last door
on an emptied room,

register disgust and marvel
at the dust surrounding
where the frames of pictures
lingered with indifference.

You should move, but then
you’d start to build your lot again.



The First Cut
by Lana Wiltshire Campbell
Blueline Poetry



the tree surgeon came today at noon

made quesadillas on the sidewalk
chanted accolades to the spore geist

the old ash kept silent
waiting for the first incision
the plum cried tiny flowers



Comfort
by Cynthia Neely
The Waters



The sheets were pristine,
so clean. Wait, go back
The air so clean yes the air
like a baby’s breaching breath no,

wait. Back further.

Before my pen described a needle.

Still, before a needle stilled
your life. And Mother needed
not to cradle me or beg me

to remember floating on the bay.
Before the needle sought its target,
through belly swell, in amniotic sea.

Stop, wait,

further.

Before your father shaved my head.
Before the wigs I didn’t like.
Before I shopped for scarves instead.

No No No. Before
the drip drip drip,

the cysplat poisoned veins
discreetly positioned pans
the vague white-coated comfort:
You can always have another…

Before the errant cell
Before I would tell them
I chose
me
over you.

Yes, further, further

Before, before, when air was clean,
when I was clean, and wings were filled,
and you still floated on your own private bay.

Before I balanced on reflection’s edge,
and lay quiet on such pristine sheets
with stirruped feet.

Before I harbored sparrows in my breast
and could not speak
for fear of losing those that fluttered darkly
to escape.



Song for the Ghost of Gabriel Gomez
by Emily Brink
The Writers Block



*about a classmate who died young

Your family buried you in your uniform,
white and navy. I heard you grew wings
in the grave and escaped in a lowrider.

You are closer to God than I. So tell me
does he whisper in your ear, exactly where
St. Lucy left her famous eyes?

You are descending into the crater
of a volcano to resurrect Aztec virgins,
you are watching over the young mothers
crossing the Senora into the United States.

When you died an alcoholic priest wrote your
elegy with trembling hands—
Your brother, pockets full of heroin needles,
was ashamed it wasn’t him who died.

And here I am, in the pitch of St. Raymond’s,
surprised by tears. It has been so long
since I knelt for anything.


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Jun 27 10, 06:39
Post #4


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Note: Sorry for the late posting - I had thought this was posted last month, just before we had a power outage - it must not have saved then...

Winning Poems for April, 2010
Judge Fiona Sampson
Congratulations!


First Place
Here With You
by Laurel K. Dodge
The Writer's Block



Unlike the beloved dog, the dead father is not buried
in the backyard; the backyard where the beloved
dead dog buried tooth-ruined soup bones and remnants
of rabbits. What comes undone, what comes un-sewn,
can be pieced or stitched back together; but you know
it is never whole. A hole is a hole is a hole. Whether
filled with the embalmed remains of a grandmother
or the stiff body of a dog rescued from the pound,
wrapped tenderly in a raggedy blanket you had no use
for anymore. You thought you had no use for mourning.
You packed your grief in a suitcase and stuffed it deep
in a closet. Years later, now, on this unremarkable
day in February, you discover the phantom luggage.
Unzipped, the contents fall out like so much viscera,
strange and almost unidentifiable: Stones from the ocean,
chalky seashells, antlers of driftwood. And just like that,
loss comes back to you strong, as sweet and sorrowful,
as wet and cold as your beloved dead dog’s nose pressed
into your hand, not asking, not begging, just asserting
what you forgot, yet always knew: I am here with you.



This remarkable poem encapsulates itself – and the loss which is its theme. It does this partly through repetition, which is used throughout. Even the first three lines have “the beloved dog... the beloved / dead dog”, which becomes “the stiff body of a dog” and returns to the “beloved dead dog’s nose”. It also does it by starting with a parting of the ways – “Unlike the beloved dog, the dead father…” and closing with a re/unification “I am here with you”. And it also does it through the complete conviction at level of diction and in the way one idea builds upon the previous one, to make an absolutely necessary whole. Quietly, in passing, the poem gives us a great deal of detail (“wrapped tenderly in a raggedy blanket you had no use / for anymore”) and several separate bereavements (there is also “a grandmother”). Yet the way grief accumulates, and its odd connective logic, is shown not told. A moving, beautiful poem. --Fiona Sampson



Second Place
Ouija
by Lois P. Jones
Pen Shells



Green sunflowers trembled in the highlands of dusk and the whole cemetery
began to complain with cardboard mouths and dry rags.”
–Federico Garcia Lorca


You asked for an R, for the ripening of olives
in your garden, the red-tailed hawk

angling over the road, the path
that took you down and away

from the empty room of the body.
The R of reasons, of the ringing that breaks

in a yellow bell tower – the only sound
after the round of shots that shattered

an afternoon. And the T can only be more time,
time to be the clock or the weather vane,

the twilight through your windows
on the page, your pen once again plow

and the places you took me
where I abandoned faith.

A is alone, how you never wanted it,
preferring the company of bishop’s

weed and drowsy horses—the warm trace
of the lily and a flame

for the night with its black mouth
that sings your saeta.

G is the ghost bird that hovered
at Fuente Grande that you did not wish

to come, for the grave some say you dug
with your own hands,

empty as a mouth full of snow,
as a sky that held no moon that night

only its pure shape to stow
all the names of the dead.



The apparent randomness of the four letters (R, T, A and G) this poem’s visitant picks on the Ouija board makes this seem like a poem “which really happened”; but this doesn’t, for once, weaken a poem whose confident trajectory is concerned with cleverly and evocatively re-telling the story of Lorca’s murder – but telling it not only “slant” but in Lorca-esque terms. A difficult feat, and especially hard to avoid this sounding mannered, but you manage beautifully. Some killer phrases – “the empty room of the body” – though I might have replaced the epigraph with a “for” or “i.m.” and would have fiddled with the grammar of “A is alone, how you never wanted it” – maybe “that”? – which I think you worry too much about matching to “green, how much you wanted it”. Especially given that the famous opening of that Lorca poem is a translation, in English versions! --Fiona Sampson



Third Place
Caring For Your Gimp
by Henry Shifrin
Wild Poetry Forum



Fold your Gimp along his creases. The hemline
created by his smiles. He can beam, an ornament
of sorts, in front of a window for hours.
The passersby may not be happy. See
the pale cheek. But no lip stays straight

when it confronts such an endless smile.
As you fold him, powder the skin a gentle
lavender. Make sure to clean away any chance
for mildew or mold, things that ruin
a complexion and often cause a terrible stench.

Brush the hairs, all the hairs, even those
on his back, straight. Leave the folded man
on a chair beside the door. He will be ready
for a car ride, a flicker of television, a kiss
on the ear. And later you can unfold him and

scrub the skin stretched across his belly
to shine like a just-washed sedan.
In the evening, if you have folded him into
a small square, place him snug among mothballs,
where nothing will bite or nick his skin.



This is witty, of course, and in just those deft ways – using unobvious details – which sustain the joke: “powder the skin a gentle / lavender”, “leave the folded man / on a chair by the door”. The fantasy is inhabited, in other words, rather than being simply an idea schematically explicated. Moreover, the quality of the image-writing is fluent (“scrub the skin stretched across his belly / to shine like a just-washed sedan”), and this is rhythmic, well-articulated writing: see the rhythmic repetition of “Brush the hairs, all the hairs, even those / on his back”. Many entries were more serious and complex than this poem, but they lost out to it through being either unfinished or having a tonal problem (or excessive sincerity or sweetness). Idealism is the greatest of virtues – but belongs beyond the poem itself, I suspect. --Fiona Sampson



Highly Commended

My Neighbor, Only a Name On a Mailbox
by Bernard Henrie
The Waters



Margaret Yamasaki dyed her hair seaweed color.
In the right light and a few miles an hour of wind
she appears to swim toward me, to come landward,
a water postman, eerie mop of hair waving
in semaphore code.

I imagine sea water beaded in her eyelashes
as she effortlessly swims the Pacific breakers.

Later, she leaves the beach and turns to look
at an old man, a silver porpoise almost metallic
with a backstroke.

At that distance she cannot see my smile
or that I am busy at invisible controls, a pilot
in a cockpit I hope to avert any disaster
she might encounter and to fix all bets
for happiness in her favor.



Highly commended for a great image – “In the right light and a few miles an hour of wind / she appears to swim towards me” – and for the interesting idea, in the last stanza, that the observer is at the controls. --Fiona Sampson


Queen of the Road
by Alice Folkart
Blueline Poetry



Lady long-haul trucker,
mistress of power and speed,
regal queen of the miles.
smiles of the double yellow line,
the long, scary tunnel
that curves right in the middle.

Can’t play the fiddle, but I’m a long-haul trucker
carrying the weight of the world
on my back, car parts, pig parts,
big carts for supermarts,
whatever they weigh, I start my day
with a cup of joe, and I know

that the miles will roll
with me or without me
but I’d better go and see
the world - I love the gears
eighteen right here, near my hand
and up the road there is a band

I want to hear. Nearly every stop
there is a cop or some guy
with a beady eye says, “Hey, babe,
you too cute and small to haul
that big old truck!” and his eyes cluck
shut cause of the rhyme of that word.

But I heard him, what he thought,
my mama taught me to translate
what’s in men’s heads, and not to date,
late or early any guy whose name is Curley,
but to get out on the road
where it’s safe, just deliver my load.



Highly commended because it’s a great folk poem – could be the lyrics of a C&W song – and for the line “and his eyes cluck / shut cause of the rhyme of that word” truck. --Fiona Sampson


’serPina biNary
by Carmela Cohen
conjunction



                                               barely rains, rarely, but for the morning residue
of grapes. wine
chased down
by apple gait
by dappled tannin bombs
replacing the very sour hours. delinquent hours. bald refrain of arpeggio
pain replete with teething, antecedent shame
and windows, windows plagued by
gaping thoughts of trains, derailed
weather vanes span the mottled stretchers. here the masters cluster
disapproving stares
shuffle whispers;
the glaring difference
in years. here the gilt
ridden host of clear coasts begins to burn cinnamon, the toast. fenestration
for opportunity’s sake. the spurof the prosperous moment
casts aspersions aside while focusing
on desire’s bloodshot eye. tell me, tell me obliquely, about getting laid
off feeling infinitely
screwed, used. maturity's
security. making do
with defense mechanism’s
helium cocoon. mulling over-
heard mentalities in the corral of modality. baby baby. me metatarsenal. smash. come from hind baal
bush, shellack. i grow down goose-bound. mustachioed
splashed brackish kitsch koosh? to waste away dusty,
douche without tasting touching tipsy lip to
lip, pipslip hip to big dipper shlook your butterfly zipped a
smidgeon a smudge
of vulnerability. tish
toosh splishplash of eyelash,
chance come prance, compress. stress test love. my flower. bed.


Highly commended or its elegant shape (among shaped concrete poems); for its successful accumulation of thoughts, tropes and things from small-town anomie; and for its incidental wit – “fenestration / for opportunity’s sake”. --Fiona Sampson


Tetelestai
by Michael Virga
The Writers Block



It has been
polished off
completely

by the greatest
of artists:

“Mother, see
how I make all things
new again.”

The last time
like the first

the first
not unlike the last.

Drifted in on wood
(infant imprint in the hay)
stayed with the wood
working it for sustenance
(the name “Jesus of Nazareth” & the date
carved in the lid of an oaken chest)
then sustained the wood
a larger-than-life easel displayed
the abstracted remains.

The unveiling
reveals it is
without a doubt
a commission
perfectedly
accomplished
in full.

See now how He renders
the tomb vacant as the manger.
His way with light
makes the definition of space

no longer an open & closed form
framed as drafted bookendings
to encompass the stories
bound from flesh into stone.

It is the tree
that is finished
from the root up.



Highly commended for its lineation which perfectly catches a certain speech-rhythm; and for the clean, contemporary diction with which it re-articulates, in a totally fresh way, Christian mysticism. --Fiona Sampson


Today at the Ranch
by Steve Meador
FreeWrights Peer Review



What is it inside the imagination
that keeps surprising us
–Charles Wright


9:00 am

I have found a shovel.
The handle is broken,
there is a small crack
in its throat. But it is
still good in structure
and could be repaired
for use in your garden
or your yard. Perhaps
it could scoop fallen
leaves of magnificent
color, or snow bland
beyond all description.
Who wants this shovel
someone pitched from
a car or truck, into my
pasture, where the cows
eye it with fear and wild
animals smell the danger
of man. Who would like
to take this shovel, make
it whole and usable again?

Noon

Who will buy this goat
with a face like a sage
and a mellow voice
that beckons the early
evening? Will someone
take this fine animal
and let her see what lies
beyond the wire fence
that butts tightly against
the wood water trough?
She is only familiar
with the ground in a pen
found at the southeastern
corner of the northern
half of a section of land.
She is most ignorant
of wars and the actions
of politicians eager
to make her life better.
She merely seeks to be
a goat free of bondage.

3:00 pm

A rusty scythe crusted
with more than forty
years of chaff and dust
is this day recovered
from beneath the rubble
of a collapsing tin shed.
Its corroded blade once
sliced through ripe grain
used to make the bread
which fed the family.
Then out of the ground
or down from the sky
its sharp inner curve
came cloaked in silence
to reap the gift of God.
It became the symbol
of all things non grata.
Accept this implement,
for past indiscretions
often are by the hands
of others, not ourselves.



Highly commended for the trope of giving each stanza a time as well as a place – which [i]locates us very successfully. And for the attention to nearly-regular stresses per line when the temptation in this kind of poem is to go for touchy-feely free verse.[/i] --Fiona Sampson


Daily Thought
by Kay Vibbert
FreeWrights Peer Review



I’ve never seen half a rain,
never held the whole of it.
From a ladderback chair
the color of manna,
the rain smells of vanilla.
Ducks come together like black spoons
against the brown skin of clouds.
A sheet of paper across my lap
reminds me of the white blouses
worn in grade school.
Mother waited until the buttons
were loose as weathered pinwheels
to sew them back on again before summer.
That last long summer,
how it slipped across my shoulders.



Highly commended for a charming surrealism, even though I’m not convinced it’s completely controlled; and for fine imagistic associations of ideas: ducks “like black spoons”, “that last long summer, / how it slipped across my shoulders” as the conclusion to a sowing poem. --Fiona Sampson


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Jul 26 10, 07:35
Post #5


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for May, 2010
Judge Fiona Sampson
Congratulations!


First Place
Somewhere the Sun Is Shining
by R. L. Crowther
conjunction



Heat only half-warmed by the furnace coals
reluctantly slipped through the open grate
to an upper floor, sun-up hours away;
a twelve-year-old’s sense of duty only
puts off, but can’t avoid the grappling cold.
Too soon the triple-layers of sweat shirt
replace the double-layers of blanket
and, dark or not, cold as it is, he goes.
Save for the milk truck and all-night diner,
LaGrange lay in the contests of winter,
unwilling to leave the heat of the homes,
as was the boy only minutes before.
The dog up the street hears the unquiet
quiet of bicycle chain and wheel-bounce
off the frozen bricks of the road. Light shines
through the laundromat window as a sun,
sprouting bundles of newspapers outside,
culled like daily harvests of winter wheat
as if all weeks were the month of July.

Inexorably, the news is slipping East,
past Cold War Europe, into Vietnam,
into Laos, into Cambodia;
the revulsion of self-immolation
has only just invaded the front page;
no one here understands their frustrations…
yet. Inside the laundromat, the papers
are folded and wrapped while the juke box blares…
Well, everybody’s heard…about the Bird.
Ba- ba- ba- Bird, Bird, Bird…Bir- Bird’s the word…

Lady Bird leads the charge to clean up road-
side junk yards while the Great Society
staggers its way out of Washington to
waiting arms of Hoosiers everywhere.
A miniature flock of Paul Reveres
pedals off to spread the news fit to print:
(Plop)The Russians are coming, says one porch;
(Thump) God is Dead it says behind a door.

In the future, everyone will be
famous for fifteen minutes—just as long
as it takes to grab the papers and bolt
down a hot chocolate and two donuts.



This is a highly-contemporary use of blank verse (at base): the form lends it authority and “measure”. I like the way it moves between present and past tenses, so that we feel it’s being told both then and now (and indeed it is a poem about another zeit’s geist); both in the 12 year old’s bedroom and LaGrange’s bed. The result’s a sense of multiplicity and community: of things on all sides. A very fine evocation, done with the lightest of unschematic touches. --Fiona Sampson



Second Place
A Woman's Fetish
by Lise Whidden
criticalpoet.org



I’ll only live with men who don’t know me,
men who are so confused by my language
that when I speak their facial expressions remind me
of visitors at my Grandmother’s church
when someone rose to speak in an unknown tongue.

I’ll only cook for men who kill doves
on opening day in sunflower fields,
smile in pictures with fish they’ve caught from oceans,
men who know all the words to a hymn
their mother hummed while hanging wash.

I’ll only sleep with men who whisper
short sentenced stories after lovemaking,
tales of wars, foolish summers and women who left,
men who drive Mustangs
after drinking a fifth of Wild Turkey.

I’ll only wash men’s clothes when they forget
beer bottle caps, phone numbers scrawled
on paper scraps in their pockets, undress leaving denim
turned inside out, throw change
pocketknives and bullets into a china cup on my dresser.

I’ll only listen to deep voiced men
who call me names spelled out in sugar
they spill on a kitchen countertop after opening the bag,
men who think long stemmed roses
make it all better, but don’t know geraniums will grow in any soil.



This is a delightfully unexpected poem. Though it takes the risk of being a one-idea piece, each strand of that idea is freshly realized and genuinely inventive. There’s a deft persona, but not a strenuous attenpt at “voice”. It’s a poem led by poetics – by the imperatives of form. And it’s funny because it’s inventive. A rare feat, it’s a winner because it’s so completely achieved. --Fiona Sampson



Third Place
After Baltimore
by Ron Lavalette
The Waters



(for fredda)

Sometimes there was wine at night
but there was never any money.
I don’t remember much but coffee,
hash on the roof at midnight
and one time drunk on Harry’s street
dancing in the rain. We pasted up
the underground news. They paid us
with rolling papers, incense,
sacks of welfare rice.

What became of you after that,
after Janicelli’s peyote wedding
and our own sad abortive love affair,
my sudden disappearance?

You looked well some years ago
-it was February, I think-
and you still look good to me now
occasionally
though I must admit it here:
I can’t always recall your face.



A subtle account of both a time and place and of a psyche, this poem grows and grows. The quiet, perfectly-managed diction isn’t ready-made, it’s highly-crafted even though it slips down so easily (note that “Sometimes there was… but there was never”). It gets more and more interesting – a fine crescendo – as we discover, in the first stanza, that these are people working for an underground movement; that there’s a sketched-in emotional history which would fuel a whole movie (2nd stanza) and then through the fascinating play and double-turn of the last stanza. This is a poem which tells everything (we are never fobbed off with vagueness or uncertainty), but without letting on that it’s telling… --Fiona Sampson



Highly Commended

Blood on Draft Files, Baltimore, 1967

by Christopher T. George
FreeWright's Peer Review



For Dave Eberhardt

The so-red-blood did its job: soldier-blood,
student-blood, verily, the blood of Jesus.

In reality, you poured duck-blood on the files
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

(enough for the powers to take notice and act).

An event from another era, a generation ago,
a crime for which you served 2 years in jail;

Phil Berrigan, a Josephite priest doing God’s work,
received six years in jail for his misdemeanor

(the powers had seen, and they had reacted).

I recall how in a poem you roasted quail on a jail
radiator; now, you work with inmates downtown.

Would I have had the courage to get blood on my hands?
At Christmas, we get together with you and Cathy, enjoy

salmon, a bloodless fish. You are aged sixty-nine.
(In the year of your crime, 9,353 GI’s died).



This fierce and fiercely-good poem is very nearly a winner. It limits itself, strangely, by being so very much a “this really happened” poem. Even if it didn’t… though I fear it did. --Fiona Sampson


Blues and green
by Elodie Pritchartt
The Town



The wind blew through yesterday.
Rain beat the petals off
the flowers on the catalpa tree,
pasted them to the pavement like reminders
that nothing lasts forever.

It scrubbed the troubled air pure clean.
All it left was the scar from
the car that slammed into that tree on
New Year’s Eve.

Wind again today and rain.
The tin roof beats a bittersweet tattoo.
Still life through blue bottles
on the sill. Be still. Listen. The rain
sounds like a hush overhead.
Hear it? That’s fate passing by,
for now.



What sounds a little banal to begin with – it’s very hard to achieve this kind of representation of a near-meditative state – grows in dignity and complexity (and you can hear it in the grammatical forms) in the final stanza. --Fiona Sampson


Dust Sparkles in the Night
by Julie Corbett
The Write Idea



We are walking before the witching hour and can feel
lights in houses warning us against the dark. But slowly
the buildings nod off, street lights and car headlights
become our only guardians. Then our eyes accommodate
to Erebos’s darkness and we start to search for constellations.
It is mid August and we are heading out of town towards the estuary.
Our intention to lay down and look upwards to the northeast and
capture in our memories shooting stars of the Perseid Meteor Shower.

The city at our back gives out growls of late night traffic and
sometimes the howl of a siren. We walk along the main road
instead of the pedestrian pathway for what we know to be false
security. Taxi cabs and lorries pass by us, not one taking any
interest in our journey. In the moonlight, cranes and gantries on the
docks and ferry port form silent battlements along the edges
of the water. We reach the jetty and point out the land marks
illuminated or looming along the bank or across the River Humber.

I am surprised that the smell of the open sea is so salty-strong and
the movement of the swell has that shape of waves falling
onto a beach. We unpack our mats and covers and lay down. Clouds
and the light from the moon obscure parts of the sky. It is a
magnificent display and for the first half hour we compete to spot the
meteorites, straining our necks until we learn to stay focused on just
one sector. Our talk is earnest and light with those words of love
that wordsmiths and artists do ache well to overhear.



A strong serious poem, with a sophisticated approach and diction (vocabulary!), only faintly betrayed by its arrival point. --Fiona Sampson


Godiva's Horse
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review



My God, he was a devil of a man to make
my lady weep into my head before she rode

with the heaviness of a sparrow, broken
winged, broken-hearted, her eyes furtively

cast down murmuring stories to me as
she passed through the shuttered town.

Only I know her secret. I am a horse,
no opinion, they gelded me for less, neither

“Nay” or “Yea” to tax. There is not a man alive
who knows that before her regal ride,

there were tears. Ghosts become alive
when they are haunted by bickering.

She straddles me, her waves of tears, her diaphanous
white shift, the seeping blue shells that she sets

on the garden stones to tempt glass-eyed birds
to mate. She is planting a poison garden, sowing

wolfsbane and nightshade to settle to the mulch.
I am nothing to her but a strong neck, a strong back.

She is not the first woman to weep, not
the first woman to carry the ocean inside her.



I love the confidence of this opening, of the idiomatic diction. --Fiona Sampson


Harley's Calf
by William Dixon
Tin Roof Alley Poets



You see, I was just busy, not belated.
The day was packed with this and full with that,
Like calming little Amy Johnson’s worries
By climbing up a tree to get her cat.

No sooner down than Jess comes riding up
To ask if I could come and help him break
Some wild range mustangs needed for the roundup.
I didn’t reckon how long that would take.

About the time we smoothed those mustangs’ wrinkles,
Comes Harley Hapgood looking for his calf.
I’m thinking, “No,” but Harley’s a fine fella
Who’s always good for sharing beers and laughs.

So, Mutt, my dog, and me, we take the rim side,
While Harley rode the foothills trail. My hound
Caught wind of Harley’s calf before I saw it,
And took off baying. That calf heard the sound.

Stampeded by his fear of tooth and claw,
Wild-eyed, he headed straight for Tom Fool’s Leap
Where Sweet Sue Barclay likes to hang her wash out.
(Just why’s another story that will keep.)

Well, Mutt and I, on Chuckles, (that’s my horse,)
We ran that half-crazed calf down fast enough.
I got in range and tossed my rope and snagged it.
About that time is when things got real rough.

The calf, he scooted round Sue’s swivel clothes pole,
And caught Sue off her guard The clothes pole swung
With Sweet Sue hanging on for dear life, soaring
Above the gulch below her. There she hung.

As fast as thinking, but not really thinking,
I lept from Chuckles, grabbed the rim side pole
And swinging hard swung Sweet Sue back to rim side
Then swung some more until I could let go

And land on solid ground right there beside her.
You’d think she’d sigh and say, “My hero!” No…
Instead she growled and slapped me silly, cussing
At calves and cowboys. All this goes to show

Why I let slip that that day was your birthday,
And why I went and spent an hour or more
Just sitting on a barstool quaffing rootbeer
While pondering life’s mysteries, before

It struck me that I ought to call and wish you
A “Happy Birthday!” but you weren’t awake.
To make it up, I thought I’d send this picture
As proof that I ain’t lying. What a break

That right there at that moment was a fella
Who knew it was a shot he had to take.
The name of that photographer don’t matter,
But just in case you’re wondering, it’s just Jake.



A jolly appropriation of western songs and ballad form – its turn to sadness perhaps not dark enough and its diction a tiny bit cosy. --Fiona Sampson


My next film
by John Glennon
Poets' Graves



will have a bearded left wing protagonist
raging on behalf of the proletariat.

He’ll share a flat with a metaphor for the 21st century malaise

and when they talk

they will talk in the forgotten syntax of washing powder ads
from the 50’s and construct sentences from toilet graffiti
remembered from youth.

Their flat will be infested with insects and disgruntled
middle management,
grumbling about the lack of vertical opportunities
and the implementation of a new computer system.

Filing cabinets will contain stolen secrets of unknown cultures,
manilla folders will hold evidence of unsolved murder cases
stretching back a hundred years where the suspects all look
uncannily the same.

The theory of a time travelling murderer is considered
but never openly discussed.

The fridge contains nothing but under developed
ideas and stale rhetoric.

This is a flat with no doors.



This is a deft and well-organised poem – my only reservation that it’s a format familiar from other poets. --Fiona Sampson


Scalpel
by Richard Moorhead
Wild Poetry Forum



Like wire but stronger, glass - a sheet thereof
thin as grief, pushed beneath a fingernail,
or in the coppery swamp of bloody tongue.
Might snip away the flap of skin that tenses

to the jaw. How easily it glides like lies
through the merely meat of me. Apart from
doctors, who is more superior?
I wonder.
After the first shock of pain (I cannot ever

capture how everything just stops), the rooted
socket like some just wrenched tooth glows
if I worry it with broken bone. The blunt end
of a finger satisfies, the sharp end’s splinters

heat me up. Everyone, unless you fight back,
may be how I heed advice. They say they have
the sharpness of diamonds, but I will not be
satisfied with simply being told.



Very interesting ideas and images, just marred by occasional archaism (“thereof”) and clotted syntax. --Fiona Sampson


Today I Was Her Dad Though Tonight She Asks Me Where The Man Is Who Raked Leaves
by Billy Howell-Sinnard
The Writer's Block



She got out of bed today.
I asked her to help me
in the yard, surprised
that she said yes.
She raked ulu leaves
into a pile of crumbling
softball mitts.
After five minutes, she tired,
sat in the lawn chair
examining her fingernails
as if other worlds
brood at the gnawed edges,
which she does when she’s not
rubbing her bed for hours
like the Eskimos do
when they rub clockwise
one stone against another
waiting for a vision.
Home Boy jumped on her lap,
coaxed her red-blotched,
dried, and flaking hand
from out of its sleeve
to scratch behind his ear.
She was no longer Rosie
or Sarah, or unable to answer,
or the forty year old
daughter with no name.
She thanked me
for helping her in the yard.



A good, clean delivery of a straightforward, well-balanced poem, almost religious in its clarity. This material could so easily have been saccharine in less-experienced hands. --Fiona Sampson


What This Poem Will Do
by Mignon Ariel King
The Waters



This poem was written for you, but it is
not yours. This poem has a brain,
so it left you. This poem has quite
a memory, and it will never, ever
forget why it left. This is a poem
that will change, crawl down into
your collar, slither down your chest,
flatten its way under your waistband,
and wait. Some day, while you are
making love to someone–the type
who easily forgets–you will feel
this poem like a vice, have to take it
like a man. This poem will then
politely remind you it is no longer
for you at all, as it was never yours.
This poem will not be mis-taken.
Where will you be when you know it?



Wry and deft, this poem is all in the pacing, as it pivots on enjambments and qualifying clauses. --Fiona Sampson


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Jul 26 10, 08:00
Post #6


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for June, 2010
Judge Fiona Sampson
Congratulations!


First Place
A lesson on multiplication
by Judy Kaber
The Waters



A girl in my class is obsessed
with babies. Each spare minute
she draws them, their large heads
bobble on the page, forever nodding.
No words enter their minds.
They never speak, hold hands,
or even wave. They exist mutely,
before language, all staring eyes,
wide raucous mouth. If they think
at all, it is in pictures, raw images,
bands of color with undulant threads,
circular shapes that bring comfort,
mottled air that brings hunger or grief.
They know nothing of math, less even
than the girl who draws them instead
of cobbling meaning from the story
of Tom with his two dozen eggs
and a desire to bake cakes.
No numbers appear.
Only hair. Lips.
Longing.



This is a deft, never cautious, astonishing poem. It makes us think differently about girls and their daydreams, about classrooms – and above all about babies. A real feat and above all no hostages to sweetness along the way. --Fiona Sampson



Second Place (tie)
history of the kite riff
by Steve Parker
criticalpoet.org



little boys under the tree in ragged shorts legs rough with stings at night the sheets
heavy almost wetted with damp walls thick as dawn hillfog stifling the sheep
cries six layers of wool blanket and the mortar falling out white and limey porridge
every morning the range coughs up a stirring mother thin as a wooden spoon
cracked down the middle from want a boy in a hammock our only toy a net
laden spinning between trees stop it he cries at night mice on your chest so tame
you can pick them up but not the rats my brother gets his thumbnail bitten off
waking to a big one you smell them under the floorboards rotting with the Warfarin
can’t drink it burns them deep but you can’t dig them out goddamn hippies dancing
up there on the hilltop drugged as rats in head-high nettles just think what they
are doing in the mist Granddad on the roof making his last kite just imagine she said
miles it went out across the valley far as aeroplanes we never knew such kite flight
as this RM Ballantyne rescued from a burnt house scorched but wild dogs the coral
the stitched sacking you know how many rats in a hay barn gather they cry now
with pitchforks the last bale lifted they start running a tine through the middle they
hiss and bite like overdone porridge bubbling its last bloody geology the woman
stands impervious to hot spitting thin and surrendered martyred, spooned out mother



Stunning, vivid, exact and taking no hostages. The only reason this didn’t win outright is that it’s easier, after all, to write a piece like this as prose poetry – and I’m not quite sure why it is in that (very specific) form. I like the detail of the Warfarin and the “damp walls think as dawn hillfog” – terrific reversal of the simile! The demotic, the refusal to lower the stakes at any point, the headlong rush into grief. Visceral and terrific. --Fiona Sampson



Second Place (tie)
Weasel
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review



Ah sun-flower! weary of time—
William Blake

I started to tell you about the friend
who was in trouble, how the oily rum
had stained the sheets where they slept, how

he’s in a wheelchair now, unable to care
for himself, basic things, things American
couples talk about freely. At the seminar,

finding out about the Blakes reading Paradise
Lost while naked, one bold slash after the other
of ink—I don’t know enough about Tygers

and burning or sunflowers to move on, compare
our lives to theirs. Michael, so many stories
of nothing, the days I walk without you, holding

your hand. Today, trudging through the park
with Elaine, I remembered all that heat roaring
down my neck, the kids taunting me at the bus,

my mom out, again, still—shrilly making everyone
know there was trouble in the house. There was
a smell, she said, an animal has just lumbered

through, feral, in pain, not in heat. He was leaving
behind a warning, something was about to go wrong.
Those gnats and the ones we couldn’t slap,

the no-see-em hours, those were the ones that take
us down. Later I insisted, holding your hand, “Nothing,
it’s nothing.” And you with your calm eyes watching

said “there’s a weasel on the property. Sleek
and plucky, handsome, you’ll like it, they are not as you’ve
been told.” I didn’t want to tell you about the day, to spoil

the summer sunflowers you had just planted, bring
up the wasting and night sweats that had descended
on their bed. I don’t want to admit that I want

to die first, to be the trouble and not the teller of it,
the spiller of secret ink, I simply nodded, and touched
your hand whispering: “Please be careful of it.”



This starts so well; it just gets a bit clotted with judgmental register around stanza 6 (and 5). And a little too much is meaningfully left unsaid – these sound like storybook AIDS symptoms, but the stakes are no longer as they were in the 1990s, in the West… But elegant and thoughtful and a very interesting synthesis of the two strands, none the less. --Fiona Sampson



Third Place
Glass
by David Callin
Poets' Graves



Shades of green and grey. We have one word
for both, suggesting either colour-blindness
of an unassuming nature - not the sort
that blackens skies and paints the cornfield red -
or a mild disinclination to distinguish
between two cats of a similar complexion.

Was it the world turned down a notch or two,
simmering over a moderate heat without
rightly coming to the boil, or did they view
the landscape differently, through eyes
attuned to all the subtle interplay
of glorious green and polychromatic grey?



This meditation on the Welsh word glas (or similar in another language.) manages wonderfully to be intelligent and think-ey and not to lapse into Anglo-Welsh twee. Not a Blodauwedd or bracken hillside in sight. Thank heavens! Modernises and purifies the dialect, or at least the poetry, of the tribe. --Fiona Sampson



Honorable Mention

After Running Over the Neighbor’s Dog
by Fred Longworth
Wild Poetry Forum



Honda really needs to design their windshields better.
This sedan ought to be called The Glaucoma.
And who issued passports to the streetlamps?
As for the moon, it should be brought in for questioning.
See how it gathers with the clouds above a dark alley.
This is a perfect example of a conspiracy.
My glasses look a lot like yours, except that mine
were stolen from my nose and ears, and stuffed
behind the sofa cushion.

The sidewalk is far too narrow. Check out that ant.
It has one row of legs over the curb
and the other three grazing the pyracanthas.
Mojo had no choice but asphalt.
Besides, Mr. Rayburn always parks his giant pickup
right where the roadway curves. It’s him
that should pay for the funeral.
People say that mutts like to lie around and sleep,
but I’m convinced that some dogs need to take Ritalin.

The law declares that when they’re outside,
they’re supposed to be leashed or yarded.
My neighbor should be charged with a misdemeanor,
and Mojo cited for jaywalking.
I’m told he wasn’t neutered. Thank me for all
the stray pups that won’t need to be euthanized.
Too fast? You say I was driving too fast?
You’re the one who’s always late, always making
excuses.



This is witty and well-considered – the poet really goes into all the possibilities within the riff, opening out the idea like an unpacked tent. I especially like the ease of diction – “Check out that ant”. Nothing strained or studious. And then a real bit of emotional reportage at the end. Yes: that’s so like a real relationship! --Fiona Sampson


anorak
by Carmela Cohen
conjunction



for Mister Prime Minister and Eternal Love

wide awake word

wedded
to

the bed headed world. talks to
the butterflies to. the flight of polished

off stairs. to the left, beware. to the right yes take care. so
scared so dared tracking dust’s railroad rust over bamboo
bottled flutes. so snared
sacking loco e motion’s

gut of self consciousness. cobra,
the great hypnotic work: devotion. wide

awake
word

smack

of something other than troubled gum wind startled stunts.
say something like chunt not cholent shunt

not shan’t. nest test rest redolent
not frozen noses. a dozen
eskimo

roses.

why lie

awake, word, hording boardwalks and bean stalks. what have you heard?

the scarecrow’d snowflake

the skein

of transfixed tambourines?
blue spotted moon belt of

falling

falling
for love? inadequate terms for remorse for

buried alive. wide a wake word.

weeded
out from the avalanche birds. shall
coat
your tongue with my lips. this once.



This is rhythmic, poised and frankly beautiful. They only reason I didn’t place it (higher) is that I’m not completely convinced it gathers to a completed meaning. Which is kind of the point, but it’s still important to make the poem convincing – even through cheating with palimpsest/frames etc. --Fiona Sampson


Father
by Brian Lowry
criticalpoet.org



He taught me to spell grasshopper,
“g-r-a-double s-hippitty hop, flippitty flop,
don’t stop ‘til you get to the top-e-r, grasshopper.

And Constantinople was, “Catcha-key, catcha-kye,
catcha-constantinye, catch an ople, catch a poeple,
catch a Constantinople.”

In his time there were no cell phones,
no digital technologies, no personal
computers. Blackberries, he walked miles for,

picked and ate with the pleasure
of childhood. His countenance was
an oil-filled lantern.

This morning’s mizzle, the predawn
darkness, the animals’ slow stirring
when I fed, brought his light to my head.

And the cricketsong, which had gone
unnoticed, underscored the rhythm
of heaven and earth as one.


Charming and well-chosen instances. And I like the gathering rhyme towards the last couplet. Just a tiny bit conservative, in both diction (“Blackberries, he walked miles for”) and message. --Fiona Sampson


St. Hilda Home
by Julie Corbett
The Write Idea



Sunday and another visit; Daffodils
the first cut from our garden. A car
journey and we travel across the city,
not away from the suburbs. Duty
calling from my father’s past. We
arrive two hours after lunch. Time
to take afternoon tea. I sit in the quiet
lounge waiting to hear if I am known
or recalled. Grandmother formed
memories too fragile in her later years
only the past thoughts of the strong arms
of lovers and the names of her children
keep her graceful hands and eyes from
falling closed and still in the day now.



Quiet, intelligent, thoughtful. Don’t like the use of passive tense in lines 8/9 – if you could change to the more straightforward “whether she knows or recalls me” it would release the poem up a level, make it lose its slight mannered-ness. --Fiona Sampson


yeah man snap snap like that
by William Dixon Smith
Tin Roof Alley Poets



so like theres this dude
yeah
and like you know hes rude
man
like it was freaking me out like
snap snap
like that

so like I totally fronted his play
yeah
got in his grill you know
man
like in a back in my day way
snap snap
like that

so like he folded in the face of my fury
yeah
like totally backed down apologized
man
it was so freaking street you know
snap snap
like that

what oh my eye
yeah
like you know
man
when you get in someones face
snap snap
like that
crackle and pop
sure gonna follow

yeah man snap snap like that



I admire the lift and rhythmic lightness of this one. The sting in the tail is quickly delivered… --Fiona Sampson


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Sep 6 10, 17:19
Post #7


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for July, 2010
Judge Ruth Ellen Kocher
Congratulations!


First Place
Dreams: mobile
by Petra Klein
Salty Dreams



“to feel you’re not two billion other unselves is enough” — ee cummings

-1-

the doomed
invent help
and a secret window

the bruise is really a coral colored crystal

around the doorknob:
beasts split &
spit

on hot pillows
lips
part

give it to me, baby!

eyes possess the power of reckless
rubbing
or
in a blink
wide fields of
stairways & haunches

-2-

and so / the girl
moves in margins

nipples kidnapped
nuzzle
heavy metal

italicized
the contraption
shuts

&

his strokes fill her completed body
with long knots of shadows

who’s winning now?

shaggy
bonbon fingers
cream puff
late as snow
outside
rain starts to fall in clear strings
the razzle-dazzle of lightning
hits the ceiling

-3-

she remembers
the first time he came in her
she thought he was on the other side of the ocean

I’m making the waves too strong..

as her new brows grow in
too thin
she watches him through webs
and a million haunted cell/Ohs

once when she was at work
he moved her errors
and added a throne

-Later-

she wakes to dark skies
tumbling
into darker skies
and all the strings of rain have turned into ropes
she starts to search for some comfort he may have left behind

a sheet of angel dots:
tiny ushers covered in mist

the air is breathtaking, too big

-on the screen -
a funny commercial:
a girl whipping her shiny hair
back and forth
mouthless face
faintly glowing

-The Next Day-

piles of grayish light
option
lit
up
on the screen
please order more

what was the sense in that
the rain ropes were still falling
fatter & harder

all was as it had been
growing up was a lie
and her joints ached

she stands mute on the faded glass floor
one ear on and glittering

-phantom of the opera - the music of night-

we did know each other in france
my face was moon-sheer
and I wore a white gown
we stood in a place where branches hung
with all their brilliant leaves
slowly turning
you had been stripped of your birth-right
and had a cheek on one ash smudge
and I..
I was already dying of fear
your eyes said
calm
and
open
but squatting next to you
was the red outline
of a demon

-Static-

in the steam / stream
of the shower
my thoughts begin to unbraid

victims of too much heat

the fat cat
slides one paw
beneath the door

-At Work-

accused seams
gruel supper

forms copied
only to be filled in

strolling through the long corridors, keys jingling
she remembers running through alleys
his feet: brown & bare
fumbling hands
empty pockets

sickly stray dogs
ferocious fangs
& in the rotting garbage
a tarnished chain
hung with tears

oh! my love!
don’t let me stay
stuck
in past progressive tense

Okay, but I seem to be tacked to black paths.

-The Rain Suddenly Stops-

on the 4th level, the 3rd floor deck
glistens

“pretty plain, loony-sane”

once, during the time of heavy bell ringing
they took a nap on a round
wrought iron
balcony
he broke their circled rhythm by making
beads of blood appear on his skin

her first instinct was to lick them
acre by acre until her tongue became
too sticky and greedy

-Other Things.. The Night Sends Back Too Quickly-

laughter
jumpy solace
blocks
masks, rocks, false pretense

alienation

mosquitoes &
deep prisons



"Dreams: Mobile" interests me as a poem for it's razor edge handling of lyric, innovation, and tradition. The poem forms a narrative arc that takes us through various landscapes pieced together though a compressed and consistent attention to metaphor and metonymy. The work benefits as much from continuous imagery as it does from it's sequential form. I also find it very pleasing to find the long-poem format tackled by a poet who works in a minimalist style. Most, the work satisfies the reader's desire to find a song within its carefully wrought form. --Ruth Ellen Kocher



Second Place
Pantone 1665 C.
by Ben Johnson
The Poets' Graves



It is kumquats for Keats
and a celebration in couplets.

The Happy Birthday you won’t sing me
and the candles I won’t have.

It was seeing June in 1994
slumbering through an endless summer.

Tuesdays were clementines and liqueur
burning a stream-bed along the path of the throat.

Teeth cracking the Jaffa cake crust
releasing a tang as thick as lava to the tongue.

It was the first dress I ever brought you
still sitting in the wardrobe unworn.

The walks down Via dei Fori Imperiali
the sun burning off the wall

and that sunset in Paris
trellised through the Eiffel Tower.

It was the day you told me
and I sat lost within the wash of it.

Do you remember Frigiliana
and reaching out to pick the perfect fruit?



The writer here uses the repetitious elements of the form not so much to create a resonant refrain as to create a sort of imagistic causal chain that exists primarily as a series of isolated utterances. We search for a connection between those isolated utterances. We search for something that qualifies and so gives substance to "it" but are left to understand that that lack of signification of subject here becomes the scaffolding with which this poem is built. The approach this writer takes is one of utilizing the notion of 'the incomplete,' and the subsequent search for order that accompanies it. --Ruth Ellen Kocher



Third Place
Bone-Song
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review



My mother’s bones served a purpose. Grounded
by all that brittle history, a desert coyote’s need
to lie down among sage, to strike a flinty spark,

a lather-talk inside a kettle of blue. Sand, grass,
flower-sky. An interesting canvas, or so we’ve been
taught. A veiny handed hag sleeps out with young

boys. Strange ghost-tumbleweeds rifle through
her thoughts. Father, she threatens rain. A scorpion
retracts its tail to sting. I don’t remember puppy dogs

or snakes. There is salt left behind on a varnished
gin-mill counter, pretzels twisted like my poor
old man’s back. There is a glinty fang-moon howling

through the desert night. A father’s hand, veined
like that, holds up a turtle knowing nothing can beat
the day out of him, not a tire’s wheel, not the sun

that’s burned clear through to his belly. Silently
we hunker down to drag their bones away. Silently,
they beg us to stay, sing our feeble praises.



"Bone-Song" utilizes an interesting conflation of lyric narrative with a disrupted narrative. The transformation of the concrete subject of the title immediately transcends the reader's expectation of an uninterrupted trajectory of image, story, song, or subject. The writer especially navigates the use of contiguous relationships at the end of the poem with great skill, drawing the reader into an ending that arrives through implication rather than assertion. The poems resonates most in these last lines as the poem showcases an adept understanding of lyric subtlety. --Ruth Ellen Kocher


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Sep 6 10, 17:27
Post #8


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for August, 2010
Judge Ruth Ellen Kocher
Congratulations!


First Place
The Catch
by C.J. Costello
The Poets' Graves



Please don’t stare: I am trying to remember the weight
of water on scales; a current that carries even when
other weights pull the vertebrate from its bed upstream,
downstream, a translucent stream caressing the honesty

of nakedness that can’t hold these failing fins as they glide
for eons through the onrush of air; they will not wither
but they will forget why they are here

this glassy eye, in its opaque mind, isn’t glaring
can’t you see – it’s trying to remember?



The poem here cascades into the power of its last line, a line that opens up the poem to the rest of the world. The expansion we feel here belies its subtle delivery. The poem wastes no language and begins its work in the very first clause of the very first line. The writer demonstrates an adept skill of ushering the reader through the poem, quietly, yet assuredly. The poem is a showcase for the crafted voice of this writer who knows most what a poet should keep, and what a poet should let go. I love most how the fish in the poem becomes the mysterious locus of convergence, the infinite nature of the Aleph in the sense of Borges, a single breath representing what we are, what we've been, and what we might hope to be. --Ruth Ellen Kocher



Second Place
A Quieting
by Michael Harty
Wild Poetry Forum



Every day she spoke of the wind,
always the wind, constant as her presence,
molding every tree to point
a steady northeast, scouring paint
from the south wall, decorating
barbed wire with tumbleweeds,
mesquite with candy wrappers and rags.

Familiar as a bedtime book:
the chinks never sealed,
dustmopping twice a day, still the skids
on powdery linoleum, still the jokes
about grit in the sandwiches.

Every day, until the day
you walked through a house full of silence,
stepped out a screen door, leaned
into a wind that wasn’t there,
staggered, almost fell.



The poem pivots on the notion of suspension and the open ended signification of what is familiar and so yet unknown. We find ourselves as readers settling into the poem, into the poem's language, such that the elusive pronouns, "she" and "you" seem not so much untethered but mysterious and inviting. The poem slips into the fantastic utterance and yet, we do not question being led by each successive image. The marriage of disparate objects and references serves the magical feeling of the poem and allows it to hover between a moment of true recollection and a moment of dream --Ruth Ellen Kocher



Third Place
Natural Selections
by Michelle Beth Cronk
Poetry Circle



There are things to be earned
by stone, hard reasons, work.
The same are often bruised by
our necessity,

but there are other things soft
and unhurt, existing separate
from our leaning, taken or shed
before our efforts begin.

There is a blueprint, the start of
buildings and rooms, prior to
the breaking of indicated ground.
Those are the scrolls I want

you to reach for before night.
I want you to have both the spoils
of the fight and the ease of what
is certain and elementary.



The poet here has taken a risk by investing in the 'unsaid'. To keep from the reader the articles of inspiration in the beginning of the poem would result in a piece not yet grounded if it were not for the definitive moment that begins mid-poem. While the turn doesn't represent a true volta, the shift represents a moment where the speaker seems to succumb to the sharp pang of specificity and so, the personal. The end of the poem serves as a revelation of the speaker, not for the speaker, and so allows the slowly building and subtle dynamic of the poem to transcend into an resolute, definitive quietude. --Ruth Ellen Kocher


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Oct 29 10, 08:17
Post #9


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for September, 2010
Judge Ruth Ellen Kocher
Congratulations!


First Place
Ways to Paint a Woman
by Lois P. Jones
PenShells



A handful sleepcorn drifts from the mouth
stammered true out towards the snow conversations. –Paul Celan


Sometimes you cannot say
what is in the heart.

Sometimes you have to paint it yellow—
listen with the eyes: honeycomb and maize,

golden rainflowers.
Transform with your softest brush

the way Lorca’s bathing girl liquifies
into water–half a head in fire,

sun burning a trail from forehead to cheek.
Graze the mouth with mango. Make time to blend

and take away. Use the green of a blind man
when he says you’re beautiful

and means you’re timeless.
Show what the light gave her

washing warmth into a neck
until it’s dune, a cliffside

that holds a head of surf.
Paint as you would before you awaken,

when sunlight falls like milkweed
and you are an empty silo

letting her grain fill you–
buttery malt and biscuit

for the love of honey.



This poem is stunning in language, in image, in music, and in form. The title of the poem is immediately intriguing and a great risk in that the reader comes to the first line, already, with great expectation. The much over-used couplet finds a home here, creating a subtle dynamic which, paired with the sometimes other-worldly imagery, leaves the reader feeling, at the end of the poem, as if she has emerged from a spell. A sense of enchantment drives this poem quietly, with an elegance that could easily have degraded into the sentimental. To instruct is no small task. Here, the speaker directs us to "Graze the mouth with mango. Make time to blend/and take away," to "Show what the light gave her," "listen with the eyes," and in each instance, I reader must believe and trust the transformative moment to be genuine. I am caught up so much in the language that, at the close of the poem, I very much want to go back to the beginning and read it again, and I feel to achieve this sense of intrigue and immediate longing in the reader is perhaps the most most imperative task of the poet. --Ruth Ellen Kocher



Second Place
Her Quinceañera
by Lynn Doiron
Poetry Circle



That five-story billboard of Corona cerveza
on the face of eight-story hotel Festival Plaza
is cheesy to the point of charming—most days.
Tonight, it’s enchanting. Curbside, she’s disembarked
from her carriage cocoon, a long limousine,
discarded. A flutter of balloon-skirted girls,
all their dresses snowy white, circle, as if
she’s the rose queen of a singular garden.
Shoulders bare, a gown of pink burnished gold,
tiara, four inches of diamond light blooming
from rich coffee hair—she glows and seems
aware. That courtyard beyond Festival’s doors
says this night is hers, festooned in firefly
lights and white gifts for seasons
of being. Now her fingers press down
the volumes of gathers,
her attendants hush their buzz,
the youths in their white tuxedos
straighten buttoned vests and shoulders.
She is moving from sidewalk
inside, that girl that is now woman,
hands loosely quiet, open,
a bevy of wings at her back.



This poem represents a perfect marriage between the fantastic world we imagine and the concrete world in which we live. The poem accomplishes this pairing in a seemingly effortless execution of rich imagery and sparse language that demonstrates an accomplished ability to navigate the lyric narrative. What I enjoy most here is the simplicity of description. The writer takes enough small risks to elevate the language from something typical to something imbued with a sparse yet effective sense of the magical. Magic is no easy game in the lyric poem and can easily be over-done, over-emphasized, and over-wrought, but this writer handles the difficult task with great skill. The right of passage poem can also easily be typical, and yet here, we have "a bevy of wings," "a diamond light blooming," and "the rose queen of a singular garden," all images which illuminate the piece. I appreciate, as well, that the poem doesn't take itself too seriously (Festival Plaza --/is cheesy to the point of charming) which might well be the greatest triumph in a poem that invests so much in a singular, tender moment. --Ruth Ellen Kocher



Third Place
Ethics
by Helmuth Filipowitsch
Wild Poetry Forum



Our long goodbye begins
in the middle of hello’s,
coffee slow mornings, roses
opening to sunshine and to rain
where an ill-conceived pathway
tracks the lawn’s undulations
and ends abruptly at
the overgrown hedge.
There, an alien world exists.

You’re familiar with other worlds,
I’m not. The clay, which constricts
our garden, the clay which chokes
the roses and the radishes;
that clay defines me all too well.

I’m not malleable, not a flimsy
umbrella in a thunderstorm,
not Superman entering
a graffiti-stained telephone booth
to be captured between
conflicted identities.

I’m the man who secretly
cries at all the right moments
while watching a ‘chic flick’,
hums along in the silence
of elevators, believes every lie
as though it’s the birth
of an alternate universe.

I’m the man at the end of
a garden pathway, looking
with longing into his neighbour’s
back yard, wondering where
you’re going and memorizing
the six tender love scenes
which will entice you
to finally turn back.



The poem "Ethics" works on various levels for me, not the least of which is the imagery which is not only rich, but varied and unexpected. That "Superman entering/a graffiti-stained telephone booth," can co-exist in a poem where we also find "clay which chokes/the roses and radishes" is no small feat. This sort of contiguous use of image and sound create a tension in the poem between the ordinary and the sublime, between pop culture and the natural world, between the voice of the speaker and the voice of the life in which the speaker lives, if we can say that a life, itself, with the menagerie of articles in that life, can have a voice. The poem also exudes a confidence that contrasts the confessed vulnerability of the speaker, creating a curious tension as assertion meets the vulnerable utterance. I have to say that I especially love the final lines of the poem, that they acknowledge the sometimes saccharin underpinning of all we call 'romantic,' utilizing the ubiquity therein to achieve a alternately authentic, fresh, and successful, romantic turn as the poem closes. --Ruth Ellen Kocher


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Dec 28 10, 15:05
Post #10


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for October, 2010
Judge Paul Lisicky
Congratulations!


First Place
Chichicapa, Mexico
by Bernard Henrie
The Writer's Block



Mezcal Del Maguey Chichicapa
is one dirt road farther than the day laborers from Oaxaca.

Coconut farmers live there, hands and clothes carry the scent
of bath soap.

The men are brown as beans. Washing under outdoor pumps
their bellies are plump and white.

We play dominoes under the shade of my copal tree
and share the Mezcal of the city.

When they sleep on the Day of the Dead they awake refreshed
and disappointed.

Women walk single file the way women once followed behind
ancient horsemen.

In my clinic, they point on a doll to the places they hurt.
When they don’t want me, they speak Mayan.

When they nurse, their breasts fall as sweet potatoes
from a basket. They carry barley corn in their pockets.

Children run after the red pullets. They ride a stuttering
burrow who circles the plaza as though trying to remember.

Older girls stay with one another, long chestnut arms,
I imagine their pupils set with deep purple iris.

Young men gamble with their deaf beauty. Turkeys come
to them, stars whiten.

Skinned animals hang in the market, small goats chew,
their bobbed tails twirl.

Dried stigmas from the saffron crocus stiffen on pages
of newsprint.

Night rises from the arroyo north of the city and turns
my house black.

I read under the hurricane lamp. The crickets move close,
the eyes of the yellow dog are open in a waking trance.

The town cannot afford a bright moon. Shooting stars
are clean as bells, voyaging planets slide close.

You cannot write them, there is no post office.
It is too far for the bus to come.



This poem is enlivened by its awe and cold wonder of the place. I also like the humility of last stanza: "You cannot write them, there is no post office." This seems to suggest something about the limitations of description, the inability to make complete meaning of a bewildering experience. --Paul Lisicky



Second Place
Iowa Born
by Billy Howell-Sinnard
The Writer's Block



To be raised like a pig.
To not come out
until years later
after the dirt wouldn’t.
The smell in my
nostrils to this day.

I keep looking back,
under, sometimes up.
I snuff water. It hurts.
It doesn’t help.

It’s on my fingers,
on my clothes,
in my car. My wife
puts her nose
to my skin.
I’ve smelled it.
It’s me,
the me I know best,
can’t forget.

My fingerprint on air:
ubiquitous, delirious,
musky, amber, repugnant.

If they tracked it
like bloodhounds
sniff out a body,
dying, living, shitting,
it’s left on couches,
pillows, shoes, socks,
on women’s bodies.

A confluence of soul
longing, obsessing
until I can’t stand myself,
take a shower.

I sniff my finger
after rooting in my ear
for a sound, a word
turned to a waxy cartouche.

All the dirty words,
dirty loves, dirty lies,
dirty suspicions
distilled into liquor
in the dark hole
of my head,
in the pigsty
I come from.

It’s lost any meaning.
Smelling the intoxicating
filth one last time,
I cry. I laugh.



There's an inventive syntax in this poem, an attention to the way sentences make unexpected rhythms. And I love the dark humor, the simultaneously seductive and queasy sense of smell on the air: "ubiquitous, delirious. --Paul Lisicky



Third Place
God War
by T. Obatala
About Poetry Forum



In one short instance,
in one short breath
I kill all the names

of any of the gods.
The god of the tight-lipped
father, the god of the smoke

in the jelly jar, the god of ‘Who shot
J.R.,’ the god of the blackest man, even
the god of the secretary on Dixie Highway,

and like these gods even you must submit
to a final authority. A human being might straddle
another one for years or even a lifetime but they

are nothing like a god and all of the babies who
managed to make their way out
know this.



An appealingly sassy poem that makes use of a dark litany to bring about an unexpected ending. ----Paul Lisicky


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Dec 28 10, 15:13
Post #11


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for November, 2010
Judge Paul Lisicky
Congratulations!


First Place
Hush
by Jude Goodwin
The Waters



When the rains come
there’ll be pumpkins
rotting in the garden
and bargain store spider webs
heavy on the leafless sumac
and when the darkness humps the grasses,
clumps along the concrete walk
there’ll be poppies
bleeding onto stone,
there’ll be old voices
reading the names.
When the cold grows bold
there’ll be death
in every window box –

and love strokes me,
love says shush.
When the supper’s done
there’ll be a fireside
and strings drawn
from a wooden box,
and love
says hush.



The music, the line breaks, the evocative description: everything in sync here. --Paul Lisicky



Second Place
Doors Beneath Their Signs
by Larry Jordan
PoetryCircle



The price for knowing God, is an apple,
she said with a line drawn by her foot,
over which she dared anyone to cross.
In the halls of distracted men, she raised
her voice, learned to pose as if her toe
was inches from a stream.

For which should we care first,
our body or our soul
, she’d ask the ladies
in the vestibule, making coffee, cutting cake,
teaching children to say Raphael, just in case.

It seems we quit after landing on the moon,
she mused, exploring her closets, drawers,
and chests, grabbing her purse and keys.
What a day, she thought, walking into Macy’s.



The thinking is inventive from image to image; so much breadth suggested by compression. --Paul Lisicky



Third Place
I Could Cry But I Don’t
by Billy Howell-Sinnard
The Writer's Block



The things I work with are sharp,
made to reach inside, measure
what shouldn’t be: histories

of kin and accident, want of life
no matter what the consequences.
Their excuses can’t delay the decay.

I dress them in gowns, delight
them with warmed blankets. Now,
pain fills their days like God.



An elliptical and rich poem, energized by patterns of contrast. ----Paul Lisicky


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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Cleo_Serapis
post Aug 28 11, 10:20
Post #12


Mosaic Master
Group Icon

Group: Administrator
Posts: 18,892
Joined: 1-August 03
From: Massachusetts
Member No.: 2
Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep



Winning Poems for December, 2010
Judge Paul Lisicky
Congratulations!


First Place
Giant Cockroaches
by Mignon Ledgard
The Writers Block



I still cry dead leaves
yet leave open one day of the week
for those who drop by unannounced.

Sweepers brush the streets
all night long. I close my eyes,
let them stroke my hair
while sleep filters through coils
of Paradise boxspring and mattress.

The next one will be
a hammock under a rubber tree
with shiny green ant-boats
that float me in waterdreams.

Oh the water—hold me in cold Lima.
Oregano tongue. Quivers.

Then come back tomorrow
just don’t forget your suede jacket
on my leather sofa.

You do not believe in shamans
but witchcraft casts its veil around
your bed in the Amazon.

You fall into the fog of Lima,
this rising cement city against
mosquito heaven, black lizards,
overgrown egrets with freshwater
shrimp in their beak.

You wake
and forget each night’s fear—

giant roaches gone, it is always fun
to hear the conquest
of paranoia, one night at a time.
It reminds me of how I get through
each wild and boisterous day.



A musical mind at work. Vivid language, unexpected turns, the manmade colliding with the natural. A beautiful poem. --Paul Lisicky



Second Place
A New Cartography
by Mandy Pannett
The Write Idea



It is dark by the river, by this bridge’s
underbelly: struts intertwine, cross-hatch.
He feels insignificant; small: an ant
within a clod of grass.

The bridge is singing a cappella –
voices of women shift in its iron:
a Celtic lament of the lowlands,
drowning, an elegy, death.

He wears a bracelet-like device, for this
is a sentient city. A new cartography
measures his skin, the contours and spikes
of his nerves.

He wonders why the chart of him
should always be so flat: no troughs, no peaks, no
lines of joy – once he stopped to hear a song:
a blackbird in a tree. The graph recorded
gentle frills at this.

Let them keep it all, he thinks, their precious
watchtowers on a wrist. Let them analyse
the heart of man.

The bridge still croons its ballads out, its chords
of broken love. He thinks about the note
he’s left and hopes it hurts her, hopes
she drowns in guilt.

‘Now it’s bound to peak,’ he says.
A pigeon watches at the water’s edge.



I love this poem's sense of swing, its richness of language. And the delicate force of its central metaphor. --Paul Lisicky



Third Place
Run
by Cynthia Neely
Desert Moon Review



You were eight when Rain-dog died; we buried
him high up on the hill where pine trees sigh
and sing in the rain. When you got married?
that baby? did it die? you ask, Will I

be buried there too?
And my words still clot,
then jumble out, tumbled like scrabble tiles.
Today you are twenty and I am not
any closer to explaining things; miles

between us, miles and wings. You say, I’m fine
But I recall a day when you were five.
I held your hand (then, you still wanted mine)
and that dumb dog stuck his snout in a hive

of yellow jackets. Your laces were undone.
Even then, I could only holler, Run!



Memory and bewilderment: so much life compressed in these four stanzas. ----Paul Lisicky


·······IPB·······

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~ J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Collaboration feeds innovation. In the spirit of workshopping, please revisit those threads you've critiqued to see if the author has incorporated your ideas, or requests further feedback from you. In addition, reciprocate with those who've responded to you in kind.

"I believe it is the act of remembrance, long after our bones have turned to dust, to be the true essence of an afterlife." ~ Lorraine M. Kanter

Nominate a poem for the InterBoard Poetry Competition by taking into careful consideration those poems you feel would best represent Mosaic Musings. For details, click into the IBPC nomination forum. Did that poem just captivate you? Nominate it for the Faery award today! If perfection of form allured your muse, propose the Crown Jewels award. For more information, click here!

"Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up." ~ Early detection can save your life.

MM Award Winner
 
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