IBPC Winning Poems, 2013, Congratulations Poets! Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for January 2013
Judged by Deborah Bogen


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First Place:


Down the Street
by Fred Longworth, of The Waters Poetry Workshop


The kite slings upward into the wind,
and for a moment the two boys shout
like pole vaulters clearing a higher bar.
Then it dives hard toward the grass,
and the boys look her way because they want
to holler things she would scold them
for saying. And faintly out of somewhere
only she can go, she hears two pairs of shoes
crunching caramel-colored sycamore leaves
along a riparian trail. One runner chases
the other, and she can feel the hammers
of their legs against the anvils of the path,
and taste their salty newborn sweat.
She marshals her mind back to the yard
and to the plastic laundry basket
on the table by the dryer, with its molting
cotton towels and wrinkled garments
that she's been folding and unfolding,
and folding and unfolding again,
so that the boys won't think she's watching.
And in a part of town she never goes to,
the father of the boys retreats
to a barstool farthest from the jukebox
with its chance encounters, and closest
to a nook of shadows. He licks the salt
from the rim of a cocktail glass,
and wonders if he has the gumption
to go home, or resign himself
to sleeping on the sofa at the office.
As he taps his fingers on his mobile phone,
miles away a second phone is waiting—.
Maybe it will join the first in voice,
or share with it the void of silence.
The liquidambar trees are dancing,
and the boys are running with their string.
The wind is picking up, and the kite
will either lift off, or it won't.


"Down the Street" brings to mind a Hopper painting with its dark vision of American family life, or perhaps lack-of-family life. Reading the three scenes [the boy’s kite run, the mother’s clothes folding and the father’s drinking] I was struck by the feeling that although nothing is working quite right in the relationships portrayed, there remains a connected dis-connectedness among the players. The closing lines are perfect – a truism that you cannot argue with, but one that gives no comfort. --Deborah Bogen


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Second Place:


for what is given
by Dale McLain, of Wild Poetry Forum


I saw the fallen stars in the orchard yesterday,
well not an orchard but a stand of pear trees
bent and knobby as that jazzman from Metairie.
I walked there to give my thanks up to the wind,
but looked down and saw them there, stars strewn
like charred jacks, thorned and dead amid the pears.

I wore love like a treasured broach, my children
the sapphires and the pearls, worn close to my throat.
Then I saw your eyes, no, I mean the sky, but blue
and impossible. In Texas winter is a drifter that comes
to sleep in the barn. He leaves things behind, a crease
in the hay, a sprinkle of ash, stars burnt like bones.

I remembered my blessings, these boots, this ridge
where someone thought to plant some pears.
I thought of all the days gone past, a tree in bloom,
a song, a cry. There are stars hiding in the bright sky,
glittering stones set fast in gold. I lack for nothing
save a voice clear and true enough for this quiet joy.


"for what is given" is either prayer or odd explanation, perhaps both. The voice of the speaker is compelling and rich (“charred jacks, thorned and dead amid the pears”) even while it is conversational, interrupting itself to tell us what it meant to say. How to resist a poem that says “Then I saw your eyes, no, I mean the sky, but blue and impossible.” --Deborah Bogen


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Third Place:


An A-Z of fruit: A for Apricots
by Marilyn Francis, of The Write Idea


It was Monday and the grandmother was buying apricots
from the stall in Church Street market. She squeezed the fruits
between her thumb and first finger, testing for ripeness,
feeling the whiskery skins brush the flesh of her hand.
She chose three fruits to be wrapped.

Later, the child opened the wrapping,
unveiled the unfamiliar fruit,
and refused to eat.

She smoothed out the paper,
saw a map traced in brown ink,
fingered its contours and pathways,
but couldn’t figure a way through the
wastes of marshland, and the land where
there be dragons.

The grandmother ran a blade around the fruit,
tore the halves apart.
The child still refused to eat.

She took the three discarded stones
wrapped them in the crumpled map
buried them in a secret place.



"An A-Z of fruit: A for Apricots" creates a small but marvelous world, at once storybook like and strange. There is a clear sense of ritual and an ambiguous sense of identity – who are these people — gypsies or the boring neighbors in the next apartment? If the child is a girl the ambiguity is increased. Is the “she” in this poem the child, or could it be the grandmother? Finally, the poem’s sound effects are great – e.g., “whiskery skins brush the flesh.” --Deborah Bogen


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Honorable Mention:


Christmas, Connecticut, 1960
by Christopher T. George, of Desert Moon Review


I was in school in Connecticut that December of 1960,
“The Little Drummer Boy” hung on the brisk air.

I was eleven—I identified with the song about the boy who had come
to honor him and its insistent chorus, pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.

Our hero of the moment was John Kennedy, the clean-cut New Englander
who'd be our new President. A new leader and a new Pope: John XXIII
—advent candles following a long darkness.

Even now, fifty years later, I thrill to that song
thrumming in my ears—pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.

Witnesses said the noises did not sound like gunshots—
unforeseen—like hammerblows—pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.

So many bullet holes, so many nail holes—
Black crepe and muffled drums—

Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum. . . pa-rum-pa-pum-pum. . .
pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.


"Christmas, Connecticut, 1960" is a vivid photo of a time and a weirdly accurate portrayal of the way kids, perhaps all of us, re-constellate events in ways that make a particular sense given our vantage point in the world. The merger of the Drummer Boy song with the Kennedy assassination is exactly the kind of thing an eleven-year-old would do. --Deborah Bogen


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[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for November 2013
Judged by Kelly Cherry


First Place:


The Legend of the Green Man
by Christopher T. George, of FreeWrights Peer Review


The Green Man persists through the lies, the obfuscations,
the pretentious accents and the newspaper pirate hats crafted

from today’s headlines. The Green Man peers at you from behind
the tree trunk entwined by the yellow-eyed luminescent serpent,

just as he spied on the Persian archers, the Roman pikemen
who tramped through the forest leaving their dead slumbering

under the fall leaves. Still, we earn our salaries as did
those soldiers rewarded with salt and never look back; we

pretend we are in receipt of generous donations, largesse
of the gods — golden leaves that mound up in attic chests.

The Green Man is watching you through each day’s relentless dreck,
the never-ending commercial static. Something that you can’t control,

despite all the newfangled inventions: something primal and obscene.
Yes, yes — you saw him once: once seen, never forgotten. Listen.

He’s listening to you, watching your every move. You hide your hand
in a black velvet glove. Hide your face in a mask. Just don’t ask.


This month my pick for FIRST PLACE is "The Legend of the Green Man." The Green Man, often depicted in visual art as a face, framed by leaves, from whose orifices vines grow and tangle, and in literary tales as a kind of Robin Hood—a figure of the forest—or, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a pagan deity or mentor, is a mysterious holdover from earlier times, and this poem in couplets reminds us, at one and the same time, of the immeasurable difference between us and the vegetable world and our necessary closeness to it. Here we see him hiding behind a tree trunk to which a threatening serpent clings; we are reminded that he likewise spied on "Persian archers" and "Roman pikemen," which tells us just how ancient he is. Yet like the Persians and the Romans, we do our job in life, we are glad to cull "golden leaves" or coins. But the Green Man never leaves off looking: he has us in his eyes, he sees our mistakes, he knows we are, like him, "primal and obscene," no matter how technology and the world change. He is the sinner with whom, it seems, we cannot fail to collaborate, and though he welcomes our collaboration, he is also disgusted with it. This poem is short but it carries a good deal of tension and I found myself shivering as I read it. --Kelly Cherry


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Second Place:


In Mission Trails Wilderness Park
by Fred Longworth, of PenShells


A stream bisects Oak Canyon.
I stand on one side; a derelict Ford Pinto
sprawls on the other.

It lies inverted, like the husk of a dead insect.
As rust reclaims the cab on the far side
of the rivulet, close by, beneath a laurel sumac,

the soil digests the remnants of a squirrel.
A little ways up the opposing hillside,
a coyote slows its pace. It stares at me

with caution, then turns and sniffs the air.
Against this silence, there’s a deeper
silence in the white sage and chamise.

Both coyote and interloper stand motionless.
Everything is caught in the caesura
before sunset, when lungs of chaparral

release first breath, and shadows loom
larger than the things they trail.
It’s a glimpse into a slightly shifted world,

where time-out is a parcel of the game—
the living, the dying, the cycling and recycling,
mysteriously switched to standby—

so that only after sunset gives a nod
will clay resume the path toward earth,
and earth the task of birthing clay.


SECOND PLACE goes to "In Mission Trails Wilderness Park," a poem that beautifully describes a natural scene that includes a "derelict Ford Pinto," a canyon, and a stream. "[T]he caesura / before sunset," a stunning phrase, heightens our feeling that we are waiting for something, our expectancy. All, as the poet says, is on "standby." --Kelly Cherry


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Third Place:


We Give Back What We Cannot Keep
by Jim Zola,of The Waters


Better to begin at noon with bricks instead of river rocks,
with three train crossings we call the bones of Mister Jones,
with a river that rises in locks, with a father who works
at the ice factory and brings home sculptures, nudes reduced
to acceptability, swans without wings,
with a mother whose hands are whiter than fishbone.

So we begin with departure and travel this distance
between us, as if to touch is to travel.
Or with sleep, sound, back to back. When I wake,
I am three and flying around the basement,
my shoes scuff the red cement floor, my legs
are braced. Father kneads them with his icehouse hands.

We give back our mothers and fathers, sweat fresh
on their faces, give back birds that rise from the thin
comfort of branch to shake the elms, give back the field’s past.

Outside this window, there are no fields. There are warehouses,
the clatter of train and track, and warehouse birds.
They hop on corrugated rooftops.
They sing for our leaving.


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Honorable Mention:


Destiny’s Physics
by Guy Kettelhack, of Wild Poetry Forum


Balance will insist upon itself –
ruthlessly it varies to produce
what will conduce to the dispersal
of exactly equal weight. What had

once come early now comes late.
What was once revealed will now
be hidden. It doesn’t seem to matter
who is riding, who is ridden.


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