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IBPC Winning Poems, 2009, Congratulations Poets! |
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Feb 12 09, 10:01
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place New Neighbors by Eric Rhohenstein criticalpoet.org
Yellow jackets ascend like mortar fire from the cherry’s split trunk.
Spikes of fennel rise in the side yard, where the garden was before the old man died; his grandson somersaults through a choke of new clover.
The day is dry; I should be cutting lawn. squirrel at the birdfeeder ground-skirt of grackles the village the village! fire alarm hum crescendo, and again Much like autumn wind: product of a gavel falling.
(Soon enough, the cherry’s branches set against a winter skin of sky)
Boy, do you hear the pop songs aging, aging from kitchen windows?
(Across Erie, the edge of Canada erupting from spring lake-mist)
Some things are broken before they’re ever bent, but only some.
(One day, the summery inside of a woman) hay-rolls at the velvet edge of vision sunrise sunset and how it goes, and how it went. As if this was the start of anything; it’s only a lion’s mouth grown wider, wider, roaring.
Much like your mother’s: the logic of donning play-clothes, of not missing dinner. farmers’ daughters fatten up we sons of nothing much the village cream is drawn cup by cup make whey! make whey! Afternoon dogs sing the pressure of dawn.
"New Neighbors" ignites a fresh, sensory motion forward. At "the edge of vision" the poem revitalizes literal vision alongside the figurative vision of the mind's eye, "how it goes." Language in motion becomes a key process of seeing through an ever-changing domino-effect of metaphor: yellow jackets ascend, a grandson somersaults--crescendo, autumn wind, gavel falling and so on, until the poem reaches the marvelously mundane-sublime place where "dogs sing the pressure of dawn." --Elena Karina Byrne
Second Place First Frost by Christopher T. George FreeWrights Peer Review
A last ochre magnolia leaf twitches like the index finger of a dying man;
under the ginkgo, yellow leaves spread & all the birds are in motion, swooping,
diving: robins, starlings, cardinals, a brace of cheeky blue jays—o one vaults
into the magnolia like a trapeze artiste and devours a bud.
"First Frost" is a Buddhist-like, automatopoetic polaroid view of nature, targeting our vulnerability of perennial-impermanence where a magnolia leaf "twitches like the index finger of a dying man." The use of assonance and subtle end rhyme keep the poem beautifully close-fisted, bud-like, ready to be devoured. --Elena Karina Byrne
Third Place Dinner With the Ghost of Rilke by Laurie Byro Desert Moon Review
Come here, to the candlelight. I’m not afraid to look on the dead. I was confused by snakes looping around your neck, the little girl voice that you had to swallow in order to please your mother. I told you as you twirled a red flag to draw away the slathering
wolves that you would never disappoint me. The crumbling bridge where we said our goodbyes all those years ago must even now contain the echoes of our voices sleeping in its seams.
How many inexhaustible nights did I stay awake to answer your letters? You asked me to steal something risky, something I couldn’t take back across the street.
Greedy for praise I filled my pockets with sugar. Outside the café the night becomes a snow globe. Held in your gaze, winter takes me back.
"Come here" the beginning of "Dinner With the Ghost of Rilke" commands. Because of the strength of diction, we follow this instruction and immediately become participatory, complicit observers. Rilke's "necessary irrepressible... definitive utterance" colors the voice that is swallowed, a presence, nevertheless, heavy as two pockets full of sugar. --Elena Karina Byrne
Honorable Mentions Taste Buds of Children and Mock Adults by Thane Zander Blueline
We bleed on pavements decorated in childish flowers, discharge our vehemence in toilet bowls swallowing large tracts of shit, shyte, shovel it out and spread onto a garden decorated with summers hues,
placate the dandelion as it swims aloft on wispy winds, seeking Monarch Butterflies to caress in death throes, excrete your discontentment on the laps of executives when the family savings invested in stocks, tumble
like a dryer on spin cycle, the cold cycle reserved for her husbands dying corduroys, the colour sticking to off white socks and travel brochures from a back pocket, ready to fly first class with crumpled shirts and dungarees
wearing thin around the butt, years of sitting at a computer and conversing to faceless names, except the ones that lie when they post an avatar of indifference and cheek, swallow the last Rhubarb sandwich on a plate filled with regret and woes
leftover like a dying man's left testicle after an operation to cure the cancer of his family passed down to him, his brother long dead and buried in another garden setting, flowers in pots and agee jars no lid required, the dried arrangement last longer in summer's sun,
We eat curdled milk, drink dipped honey crusties, pass the jam so youngun's can leave a bloody trail on the white tablecloth, and the ants and bees can leave a tell tale sign of their visit,
my wife said she could smell ants, me; I avoid bees like the plague.
Talking Terror by Sachi Nag The Writer's Block
On our way to Fundy City in ten inches of snow, a familiar cab driver asked me if I lost anyone in those sixty hours of Mumbai.
We couldn’t take our eyes off the Christmas lights, and the carols on the airwaves, so haunting, we were feeling kinship in the gravy of victimhood,
when the hardened ice beneath the slush stunned the front tyres, and we skidded rear-ending a parked van and spun over the edge into a pile of snow
from last year. Strangers stopped by with shovels and hooks, powering us out. We dusted jackets, shook hands; restarted, slow, almost like roadkill,
eyes riveted along the routine way - now as sinuous as a strange white feathered boa - the cabbie's sure hands shaking at the wheel.
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Mar 21 09, 07:30
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place Mondegreen by Ray Sweatman Salty Dreams
We're having a menage a trois on the kitchen table, the lobster, the light and me, the sun no longer a voyeur but a live and willing participant. And I was just saying to the lobster as I stroke his soft sacrificial flesh with iridescent butter: 'You see it undulating in this bottle? All I got to do is put a cork on it and it's mine forever.' But as soon as I try, the bottle spins and I'm in the closet edging closer and closer to lips that whisper, 'Make the most of it darling. Your 7 minutes are almost up.' And sure enough 1978 is 2008 and the gal in the closet is just another mistake trying to escape, singing 'Excuse me, while I kiss this guy.' Which I heard as 'Yes I'll marry you and we'll live happily ever after.' Meanwhile, my brother storms in the room booming his best Jersey soul, 'When i find my beautiful red watch!' He keeps right on looking and singing, under the bed, in the creases of the couch. While outside, they're trying to paint all the yellow school buses red as if time could be stopped in a brush of inspiration. And all the signs have been changed to read: 'Other than fish, no pets allowed." When at the door, it's both Merriam and Webster come to exchange all the old words which have lost their meaning for the lanky promise of brand new ones. 'Instead of love, happiness, bliss, hope, time, war, death and peace, I think it's time you try these: pescatarian, norovirus, mondegreen, prosecco, soju, endamame, dwarf planet, dirty bomb, wing nut.' 'But I'm still trying to figure out the old ones.' Merciless, they leave me to my hot tub, which is starting to boil like a tourist in a Jimmy Buffet song who just stepped on a pop tart as I try a few of those new words on my tongue and the light cackles like all things that won't be held captive when a tremendous hand reaches out to grab me like a hungry Adam longing for a rib in the Sistine Chapel. 'Endamame! Endamame! ' I shriek… But there's no one there to hear me except for the Captain of Noah's Returning Ark, who looks like a cross between the dwarf on Fantasy Island and the dude from Love Boat back from a long journey with solo animals who lost their mates along the way. Oh and Ulysses is there too, telling fresh tales from divorce court. 'What the hell? Did you think I was gonna wait forever while you have your fun with Sirens and Cyclops and whathaveyou!' And he's leading the animals in a singsong: 'Prosecco and Soju for everyone!' But I'm beginning to think it's just another stretch along Giraffe Highway, blue tooths, moon roofs and long necks lost in their respective mental safaris straining to see the goldfish in the trees and hear the muffled shuffle of strange folk walking crustaceans in the mondegreen horizon.
This month's winners, oddly enough, all have something to do with sound and song and the process of seeing. The subjects travel synaesthetically. The first place winner, "Mondegreen" is a raucous wonderful rant that reads a little like a Philip Levine poem with a Barbara Hamby and Andre Breton flourish: it is a seeming narrative which picks up momentum and makes sudden surrealist lyrical turns as it moves forward "like all things that won't be held captive." It's a wild, dark-humor ride in a rowboat on the ocean with no oars! --Elena Karina Byrne
Second Place Virginia Sings Back To the Stones In Her Pockets by Laurie Byro Desert Moon Review
I must get the details right. How stones warbled to her from the garden for a fortnight or so. Troublesome, intrusive, they trilled while she weeded anemones. Beneath the ease of roots and thrust of new growth, they ingratiated
themselves to her prodding callused fingers. They knew her sister was the lucky one, the one who skimmed flat-brimmed lake stones with the children. This one lay on the couch with her eyelids peeled back, mushroom capped stones rattling
in the crčche of her eye sockets. Stones were faithful as vowels; they didn’t let her down. Night after night, her husband begged her to push them back into the gully of silence. Last night, she overturned another patch of fertile earth, brushing
off the smooth and round. She pictures the summer table noisy with anemones and her sister’s brood. She is washed out, a little brown thrush. “Drab hen, frump” her sister will urge her to over come the day’s exacting brushes. I must get the colors right,
melt down her charms to the bare-bone mauves and ochre. The stones will do their job shortly. Aggressive reds need to be given back to the soil—to the bridegroom river. We must empty out all the flecked mica chips from her pockets, the cloth’s blood stained lullabies, the stones last sweet songs.
Our second place winner "Virginia Sings Back To The Stones In Her Pockets" reminds us of what Poet Laureate Stanely Kunitz said about poetry being ultimately mythology, creating a self we can bear to live and die with. We then might also find metaphor (whose Latin origin means to carry-over), especially extended metaphor, translating experience to reenact the "last sweet songs" of who we are. In this haunting poem, the odd "details" blur between dream and reality, where stones are "faithful as vowels," in the mouth of the imagination. --Elena Karina Byrne
Third Place - by Eric Rhohenstein criticalpoet.org
This
only matters in that your eyes see it. Others like it don’t exist, are crumpled in a figurative corner: a paper-moat around a bin. They are bits of a scene in a lousy movie in which a man courts
It is not a moat, but a ring. . .
his stubborn bit of less-than-genius as if it were a butterfly worth netting.
(Every x number of pupations, it stands to reason that a creature must emerge discolored, missing a wing – wholly not itself – as if by mandate:
rise like the cream does! remember what the dream was!
Perhaps in a movie it would be allowable to consider
the more definite.)
-slit-
I gut it. It bleeds out the bottom.
No. It’s
the phantom wing, rising
Scratch that. Have it
falling where only one person hears it; the universe expands a bit / swallows nothing, this, sound
This third place poem crosses its own tightrope in a "figurative corner" of the mind. It's a compelling example of how art averts its subject matter. The psychology becomes an essential part of the material: as a writer struggles, a metaphysical angel/Gregor Samsa "creature must emerge" and its the unfolding process of discovery, of creation, which involves the maker, the maker standing back watching himself/herself, and the other unseen viewer, in a triad of perception. Yes, this marvelous "universe expands a bit" as we read it. --Elena Karina Byrne
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Apr 4 09, 08:35
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place I, Raptor by Brenda Levy Tate Pen Shells
You feed me river rocks, oak bark logged with rain, a braid of fence wire (grandfather-bone-thin), its barbs worn to knots. For you, I swallow green bottle stems
the sea has thrown up, blond baleen hair, antler points. My guts bracket your conglomerate: blood iron, hardwood ash, pith. Keratin dull as barn windows. Fish-scale mica.
These are the last castings of desire, tossed at night like horns off some buckdevil. A pockled egg rises from stomach to throat. I wet it with your laugh, one final drink for you, then hack
a hawk-man pellet. Pwckk! Its heavy oval sinks like a cone into pine needles. I fly light, easy. You make a rare bolus, my compacted love. What stranger's hand will break you?
This dense, strange persona poem, "I, Raptor," emerges within the language of nature and its almost ancient "pith," so that the words themselves are as physical as the things they name. This reminds me of the painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo hybrid nature-men representing the seasons or Hieronymus Bosch and the dark "conglomerate" collection of dark images which penetrate the psyche. The final surprise line serves the poem well and startles us into a sudden present tense knowledge. --Elena Karina Byrne
Second Place deliquesce by Lynze Salty Dreams
your face warm against the curve of my neck. a palm, a panic, a circuit breaker, closing, when we are the beating of wings in cove. your nude
foot balanced on the rim of metal outside a door that opens at a word. the word is look, the door is yes. lips fold into my heart, a strip mine. the no
that i could not say. powerless in the wan sun, clouds with fire inside, mouth on my thigh. your wrist a river, banking in flight. the creek
in your arm, the water of my body. the questing banks we follow with a snorkel, a mask, a school of minnows that tick frantically. explosion.
the slow melt of snow over crocus -- my eye, falling into yours.
The title "deliquesce" is the verb form of a scientific term for minerals (especially salts) that "have a strong affinity for moisture" so the poem re-enacts an alchemy that transforms this kind of affinity, an intimate experience where language and image fold into one another in a liquid-like solution of surrealistic transference. "Deliquesce" plays on linguistic expectations and delights in a fall-out of images where "the door is a yes," the "yes" that Wallace Stevens once said, "the future world depends," and here, where the very nature of sight is also a process of feeling upon which we depend. --Elena Karina Byrne
Third Place Double Vision by Susan B. McDonough Blueline
"Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find money cannot be eaten." ~ Cree Prophecy
The forest looks for its branches, bark removed, smooth edges chase ridges. Empty air. Stumps settled; discs waiting on a checker board asleep on a mossy forest floor.
The river a sleepy serpent: a trail of exploitation and corruption. Well wishers float on their backs fore-cast in a logger's chagrin. Skeletons lock arms heading beyond waterfall's roar past a bend where only mud will swim.
Iridescent fish are slipped inside already thick pockets. Eyes that can't rest remain suspended, weighty; a watch hung from a chain. It tic tocs through the 70's, 80's 90's… The water continues to rise and fall without pomp and circumstance until it bleeds opaque; so thick that we cannot find our feet.
Pollution and deforestation, this poem's overall important theme thickens in our veins where, really "only mud will swim" with Rachel Carson's ghost. The lines "Well-wishers float on their backs/ fore-cast in a logger's chagrin" and "iridescent fish are slipped inside/ already thick pockets," using assonance and internal rhyme, musically target the poem's underlying tone. Image for image, the importance of this geo-political idea successfully veers from didacticism. --Elena Karina Byrne
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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May 6 09, 16:42
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place Czamy Polewka (Black Soup) by Emily Brink The Writers Block
I heard the crack of his boots in the snow. My heart rabbit-swift because "No" was under my tongue. He is a coward blowing his foul kielbasa breath and weeping to the Beatles. I knew he would never make a faithful husband. I watched my mother in the slimness of the dusk make Black Soup. I watched her chop the duck and drain its blood. The blood dripped into a pan, black as all mortal sin. Next, chopped plums, like a smashed thumb, color of the priest's robe on Passion Friday. A little vinegar and honey together because every curse contains a blessing.
I especially love the imagery in this piece. My mind attempts to picture the visage of this man but his face keeps changing and I am unable to capture his true face. The memory of the mother also plays into this piece and I am left wondering just what is the author really cooking. Reads beautifully but also leaves one with a sense of danger but not really comprehending what that sense o f doom is and I suspect there is more to this piece. --Duncan Mercredi
Second Place The Day the Caterpillars Came by Steve Meador FreeWrights Peer Review
We lazed on the west bank of the Auglaize, till days met, fished, buzzed on warm Blatz stolen from Treat's garage and puked foam after inhaling roll-your-own cigarettes.
We believed Tecumseh, the boy, had climbed the oaks across the river and Tecumseh, the man, had commanded the canopies to silence screams from settlers slaughtered by his hand.
But the Cats came, 'dozed down the old trees. Diesel fumes suffocated the excitement stoked by the "miracle stone" with its twenty-seven skips, skims and skitters over water's glycerin surface.
Centuries, sucked up through roots no w exposed to a death dance of sun and air, awaited rites at a lumber mill. Columnar trunks that once supported clouds and stars would relive as flimsy veneer and spindly table legs.
With nothing to prop it up, the plum-colored universe met the ground and morning blues would drop onto the east bank. We didn't know whether to invoke the name of Jesus or a Shawnee sachem, cry out loud to the world, "Look at the sky! It is falling."
Why? I'm not entirely sure. I suppose it's the rhythm of the poem. It sings, it lifts, it reaches down and tugs at your soul. The beauty of a place undisturbed for centuries and to suddenly see it's passed ripped out by the roots that leaves one to wonder why "the sky is falling". --Duncan Mercredi
Third Place A Rush of Clouds by Laurel K. Dodge The Writers Block
Night after night, you pry your dog off your wife then try to mold your body
to hers, never wondering what it must be like to be that small, to be a whole, contained
world, that, despite your best attempts to gain entry remains impenetrable.
In the secretive dark, plums fall. You, who refuse to eat bruised fruit.
You, who cover your ears during thunder storms. In his dreams, your dog trembles
and growls. Each morning, she looks into your face as if she was searching
the sky for stars. Each morning, you survey your perfect little garden as if you were god.
Last night, you paused to look out the window and saw the moon, obscured then revealed
by a rush of clouds. Your dog digs a hole under the fence and doesn't come back
when called. You pick up what you view as ruined fruit. Your wife will eat the windfall.
I'm not sure why I chose this piece, but it touched me. It left me with wanting to know more. What is the story between these (star-crossed lovers, perhaps) individuals that one would want the other to experience the windfall of bruised fruit? So many questions and the piece leaves one's imaginations to seek the truth between the lines. One question, was the dog jealous? --Duncan Mercredi
Honorable Mentions After AIDS by Shawn Nacona Stroud Desert Moon Review
Not even the moon can light your path tonight, nor the stars that wince down on you like eyes behind which a terrible migraine flexes the brain. They are the eyes of Gods' stupidly staring as they have for centuries—you pay no mind. You are lost to them in your death frock: the whitened skin that settles in, blooming on you the way a bruise gradually darkens. The sky too pales through our window squares, from pink to blue just like you. Ferrying the sounds of birds and cars into our bedroom where you lie in a puddle of night sweats. The sounds of 6:00 a.m. cumulate as your breath rattles to a halt. You are porcelain now; a doll, hardened all over as you cast your death-stench about the room. The cold you give makes a morgue- slab out of our bed, and issues from a realm as unattainable as life.
Baseball Season by Andrew Dufresne Wild Poetry
A New York Times is the day rolled under an arm as it begins to rain. The player catches a baseball to win the game, celebrates a death. It's all over. She loves you for who you are. You don't know it yet but you are loved by everyone for dying. There's no other reason.
The story of your life is above the fold. Column four, next to a coffee stain. The baseball rises, rises, into the thin air. Everyone holds, holds, their breath. It begins. You and her are through. You take a slow pull on a cigarette and stare for hours at the sun, denying. It's baseball season.
Red Romance Dancing by Allen Fogel SplashHallPoetry
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It was a magical night and wondrously strange Ahead on the path and just in range Came into view a most stunning vixen Illuminated by red sky and a moon of crimson.
Approaching her a shift in perception And to my senses a major deception For in front of me did tread A most enchanting woman, dressed in red.
To her an attraction so strong and fierce That surely without her, my heart would pierce If to this apparition I could not talk Then this would be my very last walk.
As my lustful desires and fate, I desperately pondered What appeared to be a magical archway, I wondered Materialized ahead of me and came into soft focus A mystical ruby red structure of converging fixed locus.
All around the pink night light was enveloping And in the arch was slowly developing A fuzzy image of beckoning bright red Through which swiftly, we must surely tread.
Finding courage from where I know not To her I admitted: "With you I'm besot Hold my hand and with me march And come with me through this magical arch."
Eye to eye and hand in hand Euphoric feelings unbelievably grand To the arch I led My mysterious woman in red.
2
Apparating with a small boom We found ourselves in a magic ballroom With red lighting and an enchanted ceiling Looking up, crimson moon, most appealing.
With me now my nubile maid For with me she had stayed But her red dress above her rump For some peculiar reason, had done a bunk.
As I gazed upon her form I foresaw the coming of a storm As if the gods were setting most pernicious tests To me were revealed her magnificent breasts.
Maestro waved, orchestra played, the music cast its spell Romance grew, excitement built, some energy to expel Thigh to thigh, chest to breast, side by side we danced Round and round, back and forth, totally entranced.
A dancing nymph of such angelic grace It was quite a challenge to keep up with her pace With all the moving, swaying, gyrating and prancing There could be no doubt she was red romance dancing.
Adrenaline rushing, hormones raging, coming morning, In lust and for each other fawning Looking for another place, with great haste For time together we could not waste
In the corner as if on command An arch appeared to the side of the band. Pushing each other on the wazoo Sprinting to the arch we flew.
3
Apparating again, together we did clamber Into a magnificent and great chamber A thousand burning red candles placed in the room And in the enchanted ceiling, a crimson moon.
In the red glow in the corner recessed A scented bathtub for us to be de-stressed. In another recess lay a king size bed Dressed with the most exotic linens, all in red.
Nearby to satiate a desire Were all kinds of fruits placed to inspire. Strawberries, bananas, and lots of whipped cream For whatever hunger we might dream.
All day and all of the night Imagine the happenings as hard as you might No matter what things you might wish to sight I will not tell you, her virtue to keep tight For the reputation of my lovely lady, I will not slight. For that, my friends, would not be right.
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Jun 7 09, 16:21
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place Mariposa by Tim Blighton Desert Moon Review
for Karen
1. What can I do? My fingertips have rope burns, but the sky has been quiet for days. Nightly, I roam a sea of barstools with nothing more than shot glasses for ballast, while all doors exit
into a spinning compass of neon stars and vomit. Sometimes, the difference between coursing the tradewinds or drifting alone is an unspoken lie between strangers.
2. The eye accepts all it can: the glare of snow, the black of velvet in a ring case, or the old note on a steamy mirror. Without light
we would have less to presume. We might accept our accidents and causality as reminders that we can’t always see where we’re going.
3. The moon is a busker, borrowing as it travels. I contemplate light refracting in the empty glass in front of me. The bartender leaves the bottle; from the counter, it is fluorescent.
4. You find me in a mouth of sediment, worn by the sun’s returning tides. Your hair is hemp woven with lilacs and anchored to your prayer beads, dangling between
us. I sink, unable to decide. Your hands open into a butterfly (mariposa you say). The narrow alleys flood with snow-melt. Your smile, angular and nomadic, is cast
into the busy streets as you turn. Let me release your hair and draw it close; let me set sail.
"I roam a sea of barstools with nothing more than shot glasses for ballast, while all doors exit into a compass of neon stars and vomit." The above line by itself says it all. I have been there, I have sat next to this writer in every seedy bar, in every dive and have met all those night time companions that he hints have accompanied him on that great journey into the darkest recesses of humanity. Yet somehow he finds a beauty in this place and I too have found that same peace with these strangers. He just says it better than I could though I have tried." --Duncan Mercredi
Second Place Evidence Hanging on a Rusty Nail by Brian J. Mackay Moontown Cafe
I found your old football boots this morning; they were hanging on a rusty nail in the shed next to my spare salmon fly rod. Cobwebs stretched from lace to lace and trailed from rubber studs like filigree.
You stored your trophies in a stained tea chest, so I searched for evidence of silver laurels. Each medal had a photograph for a partner; black and white smiles from young boys, all victorious, all proud of their triumphs.
The shed was dressed in dust and memorabilia; shirts and socks and shorts, tiny rags for grimy windows. Its boards were rotting and hinges collapsing through years of careless abandonment and sadness. I knew you couldn’t take me, brother.
I held your old football boots this morning, they were where you always left them. I’m going to polish them today, or tomorrow; but now, I stroke the fifty franc statue you bought in Lourdes, and rest my brow on your blue pillows.
"How many times as one dug out old photographs and recalls days of laughter and tears? Well words can do the same, "each medal had a photograph for a partner" each line bringing with it a sense of loss, a feeling of sadness. Then another line, " I held your old football boots this morning, they were there where you always left them" and a smile forms recalling happier days. There is sadness here, some tears and hope, hope that somehow dressing up the old boots will bring a sense of closure." --Duncan Mercredi
Third Place The Marsh at Dusk by Steve Meador FreeWrights Peer Review
I enter the marsh with a rabbit’s foot, a four leaf clover and knowledge that evening arrives from the west. When the sun rests on the tallest reeds I turn and carry it on my back. My senses, stropped by adrenaline, will lead me to the fleece of safety. I taste thunder before it coagulates, smell rain as it gathers in clouds. A moccasin’s yawn rivals the bellow of a fire-breathing bull. Gurgling, from a gator’s nostrils, magnifies through valleys of cattail stems, reaches my ears as harpie screams. If scraping happens along tectonic plates, I will feel it. Every splash and swish of the paddle whips up a tornadic whirlpool. Dusk evaporates. Fear bubbles like magma, hardens in my kayak’s wake. Once the plane to open water is broken I turn the bow toward the sulfurous throat that wants to swallow me and laugh, like an Argonaut come home.
"Coming from a small northern village before the advent of modern conveniences, a line such as " when the sun rests on the tallest reeds, I turn and carry it on my back" resonates within me and I remember walking in the reeds as a child seeing only the sun and sky above me. This work stirs those feelings and I travel back to those innocent times and that magnificent gift we've been given, imagination." --Duncan Mercredi
Honorable Mentions Dad Never Read Novels by Christopher T. George FreeWrights Peer Review
He was more of a Newsweek, Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite man, but before he died when ill he read steamy big gamehunter type novels, on the scent of rhino and cougar.
Dad would rage about the plots just like he’d rage at the news and the folk who “climb on the taxpayer’s back.” I found a couple of saucy paperbacks hidden in his closet, checked the well-thumbed bits.
He read my would-be novel, offered persnickety edits, always missed the big picture, complained that I was being mildly porno (tho’ it was more pun- ography). He had begun life as
an English socialist, grousing about Harold Macmillan and people who “never had it so good.” Argued about America’s need for socialized medicine. But latterly
he’d developed a passion for talk radio. I feel certain he’d long forgotten Labour. I have the notion that today he’d love Rush Limbaugh.
The absence of spaces between words by Alexandre Nodopaka Pen Shells
Trying to sustain my carnal hunger from your single line response I wrung myrrh and frankincense from every letter of each word.
And when those exhausted I darted my tongue on the punctuation and like a chameleon I snatched the single period ending your sentence.
All that did was water my mouth inviting me to latch onto the spaces separating your words and while trying to reunite them by licking off the voids
I constructed an uninterrupted phrase further enhanced by connecting with a twist the ending to its beginning thus forming a Mobius I entered skillfully its infinity.
Her obituary picture will look nothing like her by Alex Stolis Wild Poetry Forum
the children will say it’s because she likes to talk about hearts, their shape and texture, how they are simple but never quite within reach. Her hands are unsettling, she is aware of her mouth, aware that everyone expects sadness and when the clock strikes the hour it brings with it the sound of a train, the feeling of dust and the sweet taste of his sweat. She was eighteen, refused to be contained, he knew how even a thin veneer of pride could shatter a man in two; being lost together didn’t feel out of place. Sometimes, when he was sound asleep she would watch him breathe, imagine they were on an ocean liner traveling to Europe, illicit lovers running away from long-established conventions, breaking their own rules because they could. There were gravel roads and cotton dresses, long-neck beers and no need for second chances and on clear summer days she swore she could see all the time in the world glisten in the corner of his eye.
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Jul 6 09, 17:42
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place you think you’ve seen everything by Justin Hyde Salty Dreams
silver-dollar eyed guy in the corner of the flying-j talking gibberish loudly to himself.
that’s nothing we’ve all seen it.
but still
after pissing you ask the waitress if he’s alright.
he’s a regular, she says. a Vietnam vet.
that makes sense. you go back to reading a little sartre.
he jumps out of his booth.
starts doing the twist.
6′3 250 pound bear of a man
grinding it out like a motherfucker.
smiling from one end of the room to the other
belting out chubby checker so loud it’s vibrating your ribcage from seven booths over.
he comes toward your booth.
motions for you to get up and dance.
it’s not fear and it’s not pity.
you don’t exactly know what the hell is going on.
but you do it.
"We've all been there, as an observer or the observed, minding our own, speaking to ghosts or the gods in our own private place. Then someone intrudes, just to peek inside your mind, seeking the message you have hidden within you. Time to time, they'll let you in but there's always a price to pay isn't there? Excellent piece of writing with a surprise "twist" at the end." --Duncan Mercredi
Second Place Castle Hawk by Brian Edwards The Poets' Graves
“And from our opposite continents we wave and call. Everything has happened.” —– Sylvia Plath, “The Babysitters”
Over a decade since we played at Castle Hawk. Rain lashed down all day, from tee to bunker to nineteenth hole But we wore tee-shirts and hauled those clubs round where we didn’t belong. Watching the tweed and stripes, your eye for mischief broke the clouds. Cruel brother, you could skin fish with that tongue. In jeans at the oak-beamed clubhouse bar too short, too loud, You filled the room.
Drinking drinking, a one bedroom flat, football on the radio, Nietzsche on our minds. You couldn’t cook but your cupboards always offered A sandwich, an orange, a place to hide from lovers and life. Windows open wide to rile the curtain twitchers next door, beating walls down with disapproval, And when the police came you were first outside fighting truncheons with common sense, And when your love-heart tattoo came out like a tomato you gave it a nickname, wore short sleeves for a year, And when you woke up in the wrong bed swearing never again, never again, It was just a story to tell.
My brother, before I left you at the nighteenth hole with a bourbon and coke and a bar tab, Before I traded you in for a continent and a collection of books, Before divorce scrawled your lipsticked name on a mirror, Before divorce put a fist through your glass chest, Before divorce poked vipers through the window of your skull, Before divorce put your liver in a glass, covered in weeds, Before you tried to cut off your arm, tried to eat off that one word, her name, five letters, ingrowing, We were two brothers in tee-shirts, waiting for something to happen.
"What can I say, I have a weakness with anything to do with golf and family. But truth be told, I'm not a golfer, but I go golfing. It's you against the course and in some cases against your brother, that never ending battle on who's the best. But underlying is the love you feel for him, the battles, the pain, the tears, the laughter, it's all here. I identify with the wild one, the one that refused to back down forcing the quiet brother to come out of his shell and join me on this fantastic journey that is life. Golf, beer, (in my case, never did acquire a taste for hard liquor) and in my much younger days, some green to smoke. This piece has all this and more. It struck a chord and I kept returning to it even after I put it aside, a sign of good work." --Duncan Mercredi
Third Place 5 o’clock by Divina Pen Shells
There is much to observe when days are nights and philosophical conversations turn to games, a rekindled fire in the midst of summer silences. Life is a childhood of perpetual humming, a birdsong, romantic sounds, a vastness. I come up with the idea to paint experience as something tangible, cobwebs around the corners, a shadow, another time, place, excited heartbeats, a post-impressionist garden. Frustration/conversation; wails/tales; low/shadow; farewell/shell–a violent urge to rhyme the scenes.
"I've always been of the belief that poets are deep down, frustrated visual artists, knowing their talent for creating beauty with paint is elementary at least. So, instead of an artist's paint brush, we use words to create works of art, letting the imagination of the reader fill in the picture with color. In this piece, I see shades of gray, black, blue and red, with hints of yellow for contrast. It's a beautiful painting." --Duncan Mercredi
Honorable Mentions The Sweat Lodge, As I Know It by Steve Meador FreeWrights Peer Review
My tub is aligned east-west, this is vital to my health. When the world turns to shit my bones quiver, try to shoot through braided muscle and skin; my synapses won’t pop and snap and my mind needs a meeting of its minds. I draw the hottest water a human can survive, without turning edible, and step into the tub from the east. I sprinkle salts on my shoulders, inhale steam that carries the dream of sweetgrass, chant meaningless sounds. I build a scarecrow inside myself, ravens and sparrows flee my body. Circling buzzards disappear. Hawks pluck snakes from my ears. I push out sweat until emptiness fills my pores, then exit from the west side of the tub. In the mirror fog there is a man the color of red clay, a warrior, my grandmother mentioned him; he was her grandfather.
Angling by Allen M. Weber FreeWrights Peer Review
Blessed with ordinary sight, I don’t need an embellished explanation of sky. I can see there are clouds, or there are none. True, some firmament—bottomless-blue,
cerulean—defies description; so humbled I’ll lower my gaze, and notice how surfaces mimic: Iridescent dragons loop around my 1 lb line—pulled
taut through watery cumuli. I float my ordinary oars away, obliged to drift more muted hues, and wait for something deeper to strike.
The Big Easy by Bernard Hamel About Poetry Forum
I want easy afternoons, lazy love and white sleep…
slipping possible words in liquid sheets and the four corners of the death dance…
and dry… dryness everywhere…
I want the walls to rain and the floor too hot for my feet…
the laughter of smoke rings and pillows for breakfast…
vertical smiles upon purple hours… as the blindman of time winds the clock like a compass…
I want a tongue that bites! like a razor of the first shave…
simplicity like the b i n d i n g of a book.
chances cloudy… mean sky: knit brows & puffy cheeks…
I think I’ll wait for sudden nights
and open sidewalks…
until…
the sun hustles the moon .and people walk backwards
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Aug 12 09, 15:15
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Mosaic Master
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
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Oh WOW! Even though I'm on vacation this week and not at the computer much, I just got the news that both Sylvia and Marc have placed HM's in the July competition for "Bereavement" and At a Mall in Bangkok" respectively. Fantastic. Stay tuned for all the results as soon as I can find some time to post them - not much access to the PC this week... Congrats again!! Lori
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Aug 13 09, 09:01
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Group: Gold Member
Posts: 1,621
Joined: 18-August 05
From: Johannesburg, South Africa
Member No.: 127
Real Name: Beverleigh Gail Annegarn
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Jox
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Congratulations Honourable Mentions!!!!! Marc and Syl! GREAT news.
Bev
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Aug 17 09, 19:14
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place The Day the Egrets Came Calling by Christopher T. George The Writer's Block
As ever I sought a glimpse of the blue herons nesting in the woods east of the Anacostia River as my train drove into D.C., but today there were three white
egrets heads bent among the roosting herons. Or perhaps they were snowy herons. Do snowies associate with blues? White-robed Holy Men! Prophets! The Dead! The Wise,
perhaps the spirit of my late Father. Don’t laugh. Wipe that smile off your face. Wipe that face off your face. I may be wrong, but I’d be wrong to express no regrets.
Father, forgive me for my neglect of my aging Mother, your widow. You died far too young, in your sixties, and I am sixty-one now. O, cruel world, embrace us
with your savagery! Sweet Embraceable You — Life! How I loathe you for the pain you deal me but I need you. I saw a blood red-leaf on an ornamental pear tree
at New Carrollton Station in dark green foliage, the same tree clothed in white blossom weeks ago. One spot of blood. Oh, Savior! Be the saving of me.
" 'The Day the Egrets Came Calling' takes even more risks than "Bereavement" does. And they are very big risks. The list of apostrophised figures in line 6. The use of "O, cruel world" and "Sweet Embraceable You". And that last line that could have sprung out of Herbert or Hopkins. I was fascinated by a poem so balanced on a knife edge. If it held the balance it was terrific. If it did not, it fell into bathos. I didn't think it was bathetic at the end. There is something terrific and edgy about it." --George Szirtes
Second Place (tie) Nothing to Discuss by Guy Kettelhack About Poetry Forum
Dying people sleep a lot. In a way it’s a relief. Death sneaks in like an incremental thief, idly filches –
here a tittle – there a jot – until the scaffolding that holds life up cannot. Fundaments erode. Slowly,
as you sit there watching core and carapace implode, you find you’re glad you aren’t made to talk about it.
Babies sleep a lot as well, and so does every cat. Perhaps there’s an analogy in that. But
thinking at this bedside, now, feels like unnecessary fuss. There’s really nothing to discuss.
" 'Nothing to Discuss' seems plain to the point of bluntness at first. It sets out that way, determined to reject the fancy, but under cover it is building up a hoard of internal rhymes that act cumulatively so that when you come to the "fuss / discuss" end rhyme it hits you hard. Returning to the beginning from there helps appreciate the use of the scaffolding metaphor that mounts through two verses, before switching to the analogies of babies and cats. Poetry competitions are not necessarily the best way of judging poets or poetics: the simple straight stand-up poem that holds space with a certain clarity tends to make a strong impression. I liked the way the poem moved into that space." --George Szirtes
Second Place (tie) I am Dying Afghanistan by Bernard Henrie The Writer's Block
On Venice Beach, California. The tissue thin letter of my father brings the hushed news: another school blown-up and a hellfire drone takes a wedding party for a terrorist cell.
I am aging and unemployed. Nobody understands me in my first two languages. And what of it? 20 years of war, 20 years of war.
A dog in a yellow jacket barks, a spray of saliva opens on the air like smoke from a white cigarette, a silver polyethylene bag for his shit.
The boardwalk skaters are oiled like Greek wrestlers. Back home, the Taliban would shoot them for target practice.
My father desires electricity and windows strong enough to stop the whistling, hollow point bullet.
Bathers dip in the tepid waves. A beached monster wreathed with drying ringlets of salt water stares with one dead eye. His swollen black hump and slack mouth opens and closes like a Japanese parasol.
" 'I am Dying Afghanistan' selects its material with real sharpness and ends superbly with the Japanese parasol. I admired the ambition, the level of complexity in the feeling. I wasn't quite sure whether the first verse was necessary or useful. Maybe it is a bit too explanatory, a bit too prosaically informative. The directness at the beginning of the second verse is excellent and takes us straight in. The Greek wrestlers are excellent too." --George Szirtes
Honorable Mentions
At a Mall in Bangkok by Marc-André Germain Mosaic Musings Congrats Marc !!!
(Based on Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”)
What fancy I entertain of you tonight, Nan, for I rummaged through swarming sidewalks under rose and azure neons with a heartache, ever sentient, scanning the dim sum shops. In my desolation, and shopping for memories, I investigated unfashionable malls, dreaming of your lamentations. What mobile phones and what umbrellas! Clans of friends shopping at night! Boys between the skirt racks, misses in the arcade! — and you, Mr. Director, what were you doing down by the pawn shop? I saw you, Nan, alone, alluring crestfallen mistress, sauntering among the trinket vendors and eyeing the foreigners walking by. I heard you address each one of them: Hey you! Where you go? Where you from? Do you speak Thai? Do you have girlfriend? I carved my way through flashy stacks of bags and shoes stalking you, and stalked in turn in my imagination by an immigration officer. We traipsed around the subway station together in our solitude and fancies tasting plum puddings, possessing a specimen of every accessible sweet, and never entering the station.
Where are we going, Nan? The station closes in half-an-hour. Which way do your glass shoes point tonight? (I reach for your photo, the one you gave me not so long ago, and feel both guilty and liable…) Will we ramble all night through noisy and noisome streets? Placards adding noise to noise, lights out in the shops and flats, we’ll both feel lonely.
Will we meander dreaming of a perfect love and a perfect future past the driveways of family duplexes? You knew that I could never provide that for you, and catching my reflection in a scooter mirror, now I can own that too. Long after you will have moved into these quarters, I’ll be traipsing around the subway station, a ghost of you followed by a ghost of me.
" 'At a Mall in Bangkok' is, as it says, based on Ginsberg, but it does a delicious and convincing job, better than pastiche and perfectly appropriate. Aurally it has plenty of variety and authority. I liked it very much. I didn't think it would quite win because of that single direct obvious debt to its avowed model, but there is a real gift here, a breadth that could go its own way." --George Szirtes
Bereavement by Sylvia Evelyn Maclagan Mosaic Musings Congrats Sylvia !!!
I’m used to loss itself; it’s trivial things that smart, wear out my heart: orphaned mug on kitchen shelf, terrace table grown too long, and by its side a wooden chair, vacant. Without end, they caution strong, shadowing me in endless pageant.
I disregard remorse for churlish word, fixed angry looks… Oh misplaced books! Or grief for tenderness demurred through life’s uncertain lane. It’s the scrutiny of minor things in winter depths, an enduring bane by which my heart grows fainter.
" 'Bereavement' is subtly song-like, the register just off centre ("Without end, they caution strong"), attractively so, I thought. A ruffled surface may indicate more underwater activity. I wondered how to read "Oh misplaced books!" - how straight, how far a conscious gesture. The lines afterwards suggested it was straight. As straight rhetoric the last five lines were maybe just a touch overwrought. But the ear for phrase was impressive and the first verse very promising. How to balance inflation with deflation? Hard to know." --George Szirtes
Der Busant by Laurie Byro Desert Moon Review
Like a medieval clock, two figures round and round, cuckoos echo our goodbyes in France. We are giddy with champagne, playing at quintain, a barge waits
like a giant dragonfly with us as its glistening tail. Again, back to those smiling angels with their wings pinned up against church stones. We pass bricked-in
secrets, shaggy soot in chimneys that whisper confidences. Somewhere close, a witch stirs her kettle of pointing fingers. This time, I assume the role
of Princess and not the scullery maid. We lie next to one another, my shift falling to the ground like white petals. A hawk steals my shimmering gold ring
with every precious word in his mouth—love that moves the sun and countryside below his wings. Lying next to you, our bones settling like snow in a barren field
in the North—England or France or some other fairytale. We are a forest falling into madness, all the places we have left behind, the places we are lost in.
" 'Der Busant' I took to be an account of an episode in a relationship. There are lovely lines of imagery there: "a barge waits / like a giant dragonfly with us as its glistening tail" and "our bones settling like snow in a barren field". And there was that "forest falling into madness". I had this as my favourite for a while. If it didn't quite stay that was only because its assemblage of properties felt a little tidy. Not quite enough of the forest falling into madness. That is entirely a matter of taste, of course. I do think this is a very gifted writer, who given something a bit more ragged, would rise to the occasion. I wanted the poem a touch more dishevelled." --George Szirtes
Old Women Farming Rice by Brian Edwards The Poets' Graves
I. You want to sketch them as birds, storks perhaps, or origami cranes, speechless and hungry, wrestling stubborn ears from shoots. You want them bent by the weight of history, and these fields to be the pages of their lives, their children’s lives and their children’s children’s lives. Bowed by every failed harvest and centuries of typhoons and foreign invaders bringing noise.
II. You believe an ideology in purple robes raped these fields of men dressed them in heavy cloth dressed them with guns ordered them to kill pointing everywhere.
You believe a philosophy in pinstripes stole the future of these fields dressed the men in sweatshop suits gave them comic books taught them how to steal pointing everywhere.
You want these women to be written on the landscape forced into a right-angled existence held down by Yasukuni and Zainichi held down by Hiroshima and Nanking held down by doutaku bells struck 100 times and more held down by a hand on the nape.
Burn the flag! you cry. Storm the Temples!
You wear these women on T-shirts.
III. And then you walk with them crouch and push seedlings into mud feel translucent skin on yours hear laughter spill from toothless faces laughter born deep in the gut laughter at once ancient and coruscant. Bakayaro! they mock before they teach you how to snap your wrists and fill the sky with clouds of pure white chaffs moved by the wind to where steel prisons pass— curious faces pressed against the glass.
" 'Old Women Farming Rice' says what needs to be said and ends strongly with those faces pressed against glass. "You wear these women on T-shirts" is very strong. It is just that I think it is slightly overfurnished, that it might be better more compressed. The first verse of part III for example is more insistent than it needs to be. I think we know and feel that already." --George Szirtes
Offertory Red by Richard Stillman The Poets' Graves
‘This wine was born the same year as me,’ he blushed. ‘I like to think the same day. Chateau Ausone Bordeaux, eighty-two, Although, of course, it’s many years in the making, but then again, that’s rather like me too!’
One sip of ruby gave me sweet fruit and black tea. It whispered love to me. ‘How about that for a finish?’ he kissed the air. ‘How about that for a start?’ I waved my glass. He smiled, refilled my bowl, refilled his own.
‘How many glasses to the bottle, do you think?’ he asked as we held each stained glass in worship ‘The way you pour, maybe four,’ I guessed. ‘Well how many sips per glass is that?’ ‘Maybe ten?’ ‘So forty in all, let’s say.’
‘Sure,’ I shushed, mindful of where the sum was heading but living in this blissful wine which made the way I drink anew; it was the sun reborn. ‘So, forty sips,’ he went on, ‘That’s twenty-five pounds a sip. Enjoy, my friend!’
I knew then how his palate had been formed; he hadn’t aged that well. I rose, ‘Excuse me, I have to piss away five hundred pounds.’ He smiled at my poor joke, but wouldn’t take another sip until I had resumed my place.
" 'Offertory Red' is damned elegant, like a perfect anecdotal short story. Reading it is like handling a piece of material from a well-stocked wardrobe. It is an admirable poem, a light close-to-satirical poem with satirical bite. It's a nice poem to have about your person somewhere and read with a cocktail in a bar. Which is something that one does want occasionally to do. It is, as I say, admirable and I admire it. I would certainly read a book by this writer." --George Szirtes
on phil jackson’s tenth championship by Jonathan Muggleston The Town
the June air is so perfect i feel like a spider crawling
up the featureless smoothness of the ceramic sink until some huge, barely perceptible form throws a shadow across the smooth expanse of white and the water comes pouring from the sky, wiping the white world clean
of my insouciance, the imposition of my imperfection onto this pristine arctic field
that’s what treeflowers do to me in your absence, the violence of the blooming cacophony, flowers’ slow motion sex
in the air we breathe, plants’ transcendence into the June night sky
the night breeze is cooler where you are, and not so floral but salt-tanged, rougher from constant contact with beach sand and splintery boardwalk
and the belt tightens around my heart as the surf speaks and speaks, untongued, senseless, unyielding, filling the air with permanent wordless speech the babble of an idiot immortal, demented, a tortured god
unkillable, unsilenceable
that’s what the perfect June air does to me, though i seek sanctuary in the loud silence of the bar, the bottle, some fucking basketball game, that’s what the treeflowers
do to me these days.
" 'on phil jackson's tenth championship' comes at you with its firmly uncapitalised title and lines. It is a declaration of some sort, something about having nothing to do with 'poetic' trappings or emotions, but being after something more ephemeral, like life itself. But, like "Offertory Red," albeit in a different way, it is a damned elegant piece of writing, the diction precise, aesthetic with just a slight curl in its lip. Like "Offertory Red" it establishes persona as voice and carries that voice through its shifting imagery. It moves to the point when it talks about "my heart" and then develops into more personal romantic territory with "babble of an idiot" and that "fucking basketball game". I had this poem on top of the pile for some time because I liked its atittude and the way it moved through the first half particularly. I was less sure about the second where some kind of backstory was becoming too important. The guy was in a mood about something but he wasn't saying what. While it was just the voice I was with the poem. Once there was a story and a cause it lost me a little." --George Szirtes
The Rebuttal by Sachi Nag The Writer's Block
An actor is charged with raping the house maid.
His wife expresses undiminished love. Her voice cuts through the disquiet, disgust. She extols his virtues as a father: ask my kids! Law is not a river. Virtue is no inheritance. There is fairness. The night is just, despite the voyeurs; vultures don’t scare angels paused for breath.
What do we know of lust? Of revenge, retribution, greed? Why should we pick nits between force and will? Who can claim to know what ever is real?
Retreating into quarantine, she turns on the shower.
Water whistles down her forehead in a red stream, she mistakes for an untimely period but it’s just broken vermilion. She scrubs hard, the red stains are washed, the vacant scalp between her parted hair is deep scarred, shiny and redolent of lavender.
" 'The Rebuttal' is much more straightforward. It is an anecdote with potential for fable. The story as story is powerful. I just wondered whether the ending lay a little too pat, a little too willed. The writing is direct at the beginning moving to rhetorical questions in the middle. I thought the writing very good, the questions for real and was looking for a sufficiently complex albeit incomplete answer. The end closure here doesn't quite do it for me." --George Szirtes
Stephanie by Kathleen Vibbert Wild Poetry Forum
Stephanie came to live with us from Yugoslavia. She had small shoulders, a nervous laugh, and the half-moons of her fingernails were egg white.
She described her late mother as a winter tree, her father’s senility between King and drifter. Quiet. When I first heard her voice I asked
what she aspired to. A chef, she replied. Olives. The sleep of marinade. Cutting limes, selecting blackberries as if they were a song, dropping chocolate centers onto sheets of cut rite.
She brings sweet weather and rest. Elegance, for the way she carries the spice trays to the table, breathing deeply as the bread rises, weary toward evening near an open window.
" 'Stephanie,' like a number of other poems uses the first line to set up the situation. I am not sure that is necessary in this case or indeed in some of the others. Entering in medias res is generally good advice. The end is beautiful and not over-resolved. The second verse is nicely enigmatic. The third maybe a touch over-explicit but still under control. Maybe at the very end, as with "The Rebuttal," I feel the poem is too much resolved in the writer's mind before the poem actually starts. It's a nuisance 'having something to say'. It's always better to discover what one might have to say." --George Szirtes
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Sep 12 09, 18:36
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place Smoke and Mirrors by Antonia Clark The Waters
My sister dressed in the colors of water and stone, walked out on foggy mornings in search of misted rivers, folded herself into low-lying clouds.
She insisted that none of this was for the purpose of deception. It’s a matter of becoming
accustomed, she said. It’s incremental.
She studied the art of graceful sleight: To take her leave without notice, without a visible stirring of air, as if dying were only another illusion.
The hard part is what to do with the body, she told me. The rest is nothing. It’s easy to disappear.
"The first verse immediately grabs the reader with a clear image that has potential for transformation. We read on seeing where it might lead. The combined effect of water, stone, fog, mist, river make the point at which the sister folds herself into low-lying clouds natural. We accept 'folded herself'' as the natural product of all the factors. At this stage the poem is rich but could end up merely pretty. Then the vocabulary hardens - insisted, deception, incremental - and we feel we may be moving to another level of meaning. These are hard business terms . A transaction of some sort is hinted at. The quatrain beginning 'She studied' moves us into ambiguous territory. We are uncertain whether her folding is about death or a kind of avoidance. Now there is a sense of haunting. The balance is never completely resolved though the language is firmly declarative.=2 0In the end we feel we have approached a difficult subject - indeed a difficult person - with a proper respect. A good poem can feel as if a ghost as passed through us. It doesn't need atmospheric effects. Nothing has been intentionally hidden. Another way to think of it might be like treading on ice, testing each step as you go. That is what this poem does." --George Szirtes
Second Place (tie) Doris Gray pictures regret by Jennifer Bennett conjunction
the old woman has a guilt edged box on the wall and in it sit her confessions two buttons and she cuts through the wrists of the doll her mother made for her sister removing the buttons imbued with a glistening green hate with the wish it was her sister’s hands she had hacked off with those sweet little scissors in the shape of a heron the shell that looks like a shoe takes her walking the isthmus where they said you would find nothing grow nothing leave nothing but footprints and there it was hard as love a matchbox boat her daughter made her so many years ago before floating away on a sea of years wet with neglect that tower of torn letters small dried flowers mothballs dust dust dust
"An interesting poem from the narrative point of view, moving through stages, developing rhetoric as it goes through its sinister twists and turns to great effect. There may be a difficulty in 'telling a story' that so clearly has a context outside the poem since poems generally have to be their own complete worlds. The emotional intensity of the last three lines must be coming from somewhere, presumably from the cutting of the wrists of the doll and that 'green hate'. The appearance of a they and a you in the middle - they disappear again - is a little disorientating. There is a really interesting question here regarding the world and the poem since, clearly, poems are set in the world and cannot be entirely self-referencing, but there must, I suspect, be a negotiation with that world within the terms of the poem. This feels a little like a dramatic speech from something longer. It would help me - my ignorance - to know who Doris Gray was." --George Szirtes
Second Place (tie) Migrations by Billy Howell-Sinnard The Writer's Block
I roast words over the fire, warm my feet,
soles to flames, get down to hear the earth breathe.
You drink cowboy coffee late, the mug
warming fingers, feel the moon close to your face.
I can’t stop laughing until I cry and don’t know why.
Your body rises in the sleeping bag. The moon settles
in the trees, a great white bird migrating horizon to horizon.
"Splendid last image on which a great deal depends. I am not sure what to do with the intensity of emotion in verse 5, or why the words are being roasted in line 1. I don't mean I cannot guess, it's just that the emotions seem to be generated from outside the poem and that can make the reader feel like an intruder on the I and you. And I cannot feel too secure in my guess. I am left looking over my shoulder in case I have missed something. I like everything in this poem, particularly the end. Maybe I just want a little more context for the feeling. It is a very difficult issue because indicating that context is not the same as explaining20it. Maybe one more verse of three lines, somewhere near the beginning would do it." --George Szirtes
Second Place (tie) Toad Festival by Connie DeDona Blueline
Night falls and the air is stagnant and sticky with white gardenia, stephanotis and pungent citronella. A fountain sprays into a koi pond and echoes across the valley. In the distance are the sounds of after dinner dishes being soaped, rinsed and towel dried. Television sets glowing and humming with families settling into “The Biggest Loser” and “Howie Do It”. At the appointed hour a silent Bufo Army advances, each to their own predetermined spot. Out on a lonely stretch of road beneath the glow of a street lamp, hungry eyes examine the night sky, patiently waiting beneath the bug lights by the well, or in the hollow of a palm tree, compelled to perform their part in the nightly ritual. Sometimes in witless surrender squashed beneath an automobile tire. Trancelike, as thousands of wings float aimlessly down all around them, relieved of their former frames. While listening overhead to the snap and sizzle, of a multitude of tiny bodies being roasted to perfection, their tongues salivating as their dinner drops and is swallowed whole. The Formosan termite swarm is timely on their kamikaze mission, blindly buzzing their dinner dates in reckless abandon. A wretched few manage to escape wingless and continue to crawl until they drop, into stagnant watery graves, behind downspouts and into crevices between rocks, occasionally crushed beneath the feet of an uninvited passerby, rushing inside to escape the carnage, the rank and lusty slurping and spewing of the horde.
"A very clear sense of place and occasion: all those specifics. Gardenia, staphanotis, citronella, the koi pond. Then we tune in to the sounds and become aware of the wider world, the camera panning. The toad army appears in ominous fashion right on cue after the the TV shows are named. From then on we are with the toads. There is, perhaps unavoidably, an echo of Heaney's 'The Death of a Naturalist' here, but the sensuous reaction in terms of alliteration - surrender squashed, snap and sizzle, former frames, dinner drops, blindly buzzing - and the grand guignolesque overload of the last line. If one of the functions of poetry is to turn the world of physical experience into language this poem does it very well, plus a little more which20is down to the introduction of the first five lines that help relate the strangeness to the ordinary down home quality of the experience around it." --George Szirtes
Highly Commended Ice by mignon ledgard conjuntion
why leave shadows and enter the fractured red when ploughed snow brings the horizon closer
it is such poor vision behind a broken window
glass shattered to dust we walk and wonder why feet ache
"A good short poem - the last line feels a little thinner than the rest: such a rational question after that fractured red! The aural aspect is lovely: the sheer sound of it is excellent." --George Szirtes
Highly Commended Island by Judy Thompson The Town
It was the goal in the center of everyone’s summer; you sat on a rock in the sun thinking, I could do that now and all at once there you were with your toes in the water, mind made up. The air tingled in your nose as you struck out past the dropoff, further out than you had ever been; the lake bottom disappeared beneath you and where the water a moment ago was filled with sunbacked shadows now it was dark, cold, a glimpse of what infinity must look like. You saw hints of drowned stumps impossibly far down, tried to ignore the voices calling you back– the only thing that gave you courage was one strong voice saying, “Let her try, for Christ’s sake!” and when you clambered onto that far piney bank winded, arms aching, you suddenly understood what halfway there really meant
"A straightforward tightly written but sensuous narrative that depends on realizing the detail and allowing the reader to feel the power of those drowned stumps. The you is effectively internalized for the speaker for whom something is clearly at stake - or was at stake. Recounting an event of this nature - an initiation or encounter with infinity - carries a slight risk of inoculating the reader against risk. We kn ow the experience is over and are left to wonder why we are being told this now and how much weight 'halfway there' carries." --George Szirtes
Highly Commended my name is river by Derek Richard Wild Poetry Forum
carlos says my face resembles a frenzy of boiling rivers. this is the only compliment my face has ever received.
every morning since i was five i’ve begged the mirror to lie. mirrors are the most honest people i know.
carlos describes girls. how they taste like stale popcorn, feel like an old couch, how they invite through eyes, stamp out through scorn. i’ll get you a girl, someday,
he promises, blind, drunk or crazy. every morning since i was five i remember daddy, acid and sirens. my cheekbones were soft, people all around me, screaming
stay calm, stay calm. carlos calls me River. it’s one of the kindest things anyone has ever said. someday i’m going to get married, father beautiful children, drunk, blind or crazy.
the mirror will lie, the itch behind my eyes will fade and the frenzy of rivers will blend into a calming of sea. dear daddy, i’ll write, my name is river, i am your son.
"The speaker is the really interesting thing here, since he is constructed like a character in fiction, with a voice out of the dramatic monologue tradition. The voice hangs in the air like something we recognize, something with baggage that is not entirely unfamiliar. That recognition helps for the most part since the baggage involves archetypes. The potential disadvantage is that the experience may remain 'out there', like a genre movie in which we know the tropes but stick with it because it is so well made. I am, I should add, assuming that the poem is not a piece of straight confessional. It feels a little too honed to be taken as a straight personal account, which would, after all, bring in its own problems." --George Szirtes
Highly Commended Oils of Soft Fingers by S. Thomas Summers The Writer's Block
The sofa absorbs early sun, siphons heat. Already, its paisley swirls brighten. Small flowers –
petal edges rise like a sylvan Braille, fertilized by cookie crumbs, potato chip salt. I ask some unseen vine to tighten
its itchy length around my waist, pull me beneath the cushions where I’d lie – a forgotten coin. One day you’ll misplace
your eyeglasses, fail to remember where you abandoned your keys. As you rummage through the darkness that bears these
cushions, you’ll rediscover me, polish my ache with the oils of soft fingers.
"This is a lovely vignette - that sylvan Braille is nicely found - and the warmth and sensuousness of it are beautifully conveyed. My one uncertainty is about the ending, that may be either a bit too complete or maybe not quite enough. The lost coin image is at the core of the poem. Maybe we should have a little more of the coin as coin at the end." --George Szirtes
Honorable Mentions
true romance in black and white by Alex Stolis Wild Poetry Forum
on the charcoal gray corner of franklin and chicago a sepia woman is alone, maybe waiting for a bus, maybe lonely, afraid, needing protection; maybe on the make with a razor sharp attitude ready to slice you open the instant you utter a sound. she brings a cigarette to her lips, hesitates for a moment and once you crawl inside that moment you are unsure, words lodge in your throat, your eyes drawn to the crease in her skirt, the curve of her hips as she shifts her weight, moves her left hand to light the cigarette. there is a spark and a flame and you catch a brief flash of truth or is it a well concealed lie. she deliberately closes her eyes and you count onethousandone, onethousandtwo, when they open she exhales. you want the smoke to cut through you, want to know her name, where she was born, you want to take her home, want to walk away and find another drink in another city on another corner and though you don’t believe in god you pray for primary colors and rain to break the silence. she takes a final drag; in the still air you catch your breath and wish for her kiss to bleed you dry until all that’s left are ragged shreds of apathy drenched in green, blue and red.
Surgery at 14 by Timothy Blighton Desert Moon Review
For Emily
1. The doctor returned from his antiseptic kingdom with a gift: your son with his ribs split to reveal the un-lit entrails and their favorable signs, where his heart bulged through the separation, like an unclenching fist, one held holy by you, since his father struck him
down the stairs. The hiss of veins coil and snake through his chest with the charm of blood from a flywheel beating an irregular time: he has inherited your straw hair, coal-eyes; he, too, has been stripped naked by prescription, set upon by a father’s curse of rage.
2. Beside his bed, the hum of machines. An air hose strung around his neck, he is sewn back together, all the trauma settling between dry coughs. Yet, his eyes will open into white knuckles; fever-dreams will set, shaking his useless arms. He will begin to sweat; the nurses will be unable
to mix the proper ingredients to turn bodyweight into silence, unable to dispel the moan-cry, or reach out and cup the chest of a sutured effigy. His voice will sting the nostrils. The call-light will code: open-close, open-close, open-close.
Tasting the Blade by Pam O'Shaughnessy criticalpoet.org
during the time of the babies before the return of the large hadron collider when my arms were full of you the warm day lay quiet and blue we took naps the hours before lunch
were thirteen billion comfort - belonging to our slow movements as if we’d last into afternoon and you’d be forever new lifting the spoon like a spoon has never been lifted before
with joy as if joy is eternal discovery pushing forward into time and mass at the stores of women you hid behind the racks at noon the clocks held still noon even after the ice-cream still noon at the kindergarten door
I was a grazing ewe raising my head to see again the noon the lamb the grass the grass the lamb the unending noon look look you’d say and I’d look lazily stroking your soft hair at the daylit moon a slip showing
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Oct 7 09, 11:21
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Mosaic Master
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
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September's winners have been announced - I'll be updated this reply with the results soon!
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Oct 9 09, 18:08
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place We Burned Incense by Judy Swann The WatersAnd this is my mother’s mother, your great grandmother, and this is her brother, this is my dad, they’re all dead. This is your dad before we were married, this is me, you can tell I was born in the year of the mountain goat by the way I’m standing.
I never mastered politeness, and I like to be corrected when I err. So, can I have the salt? Would you please pass me the salt? Sorry to bother you, but could you pass me the salt, please? He was only thirty-nine when he did it, it was a lot less red
than you would expect, and also bloodier, if you can picture that. “Humbling” or “exalting,” those were the poles. It was the year the tornado touched down. And that’s me again, how do you like my pony, my pleated dress? I was a loved child, spoiled.
He could no longer bear it, you know how the young can cry for a very long time and then some minutes after calm has set in, a whooping sound shudders its way out and then quiet again? You know what I mean? Not the serene, poised people
In the leather armchairs of the university library, but the people on the bus with the tweety-bird shirts and the red noses, glum, with crooked teeth, muddy clothing, ripped clothing that it would be rude to photograph, even to get the crown of roses
documented, as it thundered mightily into the summer dusk, each peal rumbling for five or six long seconds, waterfalls of rain, pillows of it soaking into the wooden bridge, he was never the one who liked to get wet, never liked the water much even in paintings"This gets it over the others because it is substantial, has a compulsive voice, takes risks with its reiterations in the second verse, tells a story without too much 'telling'. It is in effect a dramatic monologue that is close to the voice that makes it (many of Browning's are deliberately distanced from the maker). The fourth verse seems to me properly embodied, not a special effect, but firmly located in the speaking voice, that contains its irony with a certain edge. I wondered about the weak line endings (twice) of "the". It isn't quite syllabics but the form of it is teasing and faintly echoes Sapphics. It understands and plays off form." --George SzirtesSecond Place The Secret Life by Laurie Byro Desert Moon ReviewSeeing things in a light that spirals down through the arch and tunnel of a nautilus shell, on the strength of nothing too important, genuine or real, a modesty, a sense of eyes indirect, a pearl that bursts snowflake on a green velvet coat. I’ve memorized us like that, your arm as it extends to pass me a cup, a copper penny slant of room, the smell of bergamot
behind the veils of buttery sun. Across the sea of words, the bickering, the old habits, the stingy yelp of Dickinson as we read to each other out loud. The wilderness of the mind is where you are: a forest that crouches under a bedroom window while you sleep and feral words find you."An unrhymed sonnet, it was the last two lines that clinched it for me: the forest that crouches under a bedroom window (a memory of Baudelaire's forest of symbols?) and the feral words at the end. That firmed things up and gave the poem necessary claws. I liked the light spiraling down, then lost it a little on the snowflake and the green velvet coat. I didn't quite know how I was to respond to that. The last six lines, indeed from the smell of bergamot onwards, are very good." --George SzirtesThird Place (tie) On Waking I Think of Winter by Sarah Sloat Desert Moon Reviewmostly because my legs jut like a long pier out over waves in the dark’s oceanic pitch
I think of winter when my husband snores across the expanse of bed, tundra-vast because children insist on visiting
papoose, bear cub, eskimo: wool blanket curled below their throats
and I wake like Jack London, only less bearded, less brave, though the brown kiss of a dog assists me
where just moments ago I was steeped in sleep, hallucinating a daisy-faced cartoon landscape, now
I think of winter because of dreams redressed by startling alarms, because I have no idea how to go on
and I think of winter as I always do at dawn and always did, before I guessed what winter was "A splendidly funny and childlike image to begin with, immediately given gravity by the dark oceanic pitch, the poem opens on its large possibilities with confidence. Then comes the snoring husband and the waking like Jack London. All this is lovely. The poem then moves on to a meditation about winter and I slightly wish it had moved back into the rougher, more surprising territory it set out with - not necessarily the same image but in that realm. It goes just a touch abstract at the end. It is still a very good piece of work but that cartoon landscape might have come up with something more. But excellent first eleven lines." --George SzirtesThird Place (tie) Untitled by Matt Moseman conjunctionopening myself up is often difficult on the order of opening a can with only teeth and fingernails.
This, of course, has little to do with anything
as if anything had anything to do.
a word I use far too much is they. I am obsessed with them and their workings and I hate them and I am so sure that they are responsible for all I despise.
I never found inspiration in the stars or any other celestial component for that matter. The constellations have only ever gotten me the girl, by way of dissimulating speech.
every god I ever brought down from the sky has been a little mumpsimus and I will not cut my hair ever again unless one of these days I imprecate a household god who is honestly bigger than my middling pecker.
"This, like the winner, is voiced for character, and has a real and convincing vigor that increases as the poem progresses. I think the verse form is a touch less substantial than it might be. There is real firmness in the voice and maybe the verse might have articulated that even more. I am not absolutely sure about the first three lines though I like them in themselves. I just don't see how they are developed as theme. The last two verses are the best of it - in fact the last two verses may actually BE the poem. And what a fine poem that would be." --George SzirtesThird Place (tie) Illegal #2 by Sergio Ortiz Wild Poetry Forum
She makes it difficult to ignore the wet clothes on a man’s back
as he wanders into la migra’s office for a 24-hour stay, or a free jet ride home.
She’s too alarmed to remember the two daughters left behind.
Umbrellas keep her in the shade while officers bring tamarind flavored snowballs to douse her dehydration.
They wick the sweat off her breast, keep her armpits from staining, stinking the robe.
Tomorrow she’ll rattle all this away like cows shake off flies.
"This is succinct, well shaped, the language high register but subtle and supple. "They wick the sweat off her breast" is nicely dropped in. And the subject is, of course, compassion and its lack but does not make a great dramatic gesture either way, retaining its distance without coldness, out of a kind of respect." --George SzirtesHonorable Mentions
Acquired Tastes by Allen M. Weber FreeWrights Peer Review
If he’s perturbed at all by the drowning wasp, twirling in week-old dishwater, or dismayed at the ruin of what’s left
of their ficus—its leaves shriveled and dropping like question marks on the floor— he refuses to concede any of it.
His was a talent for beginning; but once past the shallow bluster of seduction he found her to be an acquired taste, like
even a single malt Scotch. He’d deny using the toothbrush she left behind and claim that photographs of her, and them
together, didn’t upset him, that they were taken down to mute the walls: he’d never get used to the colors she chose.
And he’s been too busy to buy new paint, so the unfaded rectangles still mock the weakness of his endgame. Resigning
to suffer through her favorite Coltrane, he sips diluted Scotch and wonders why one wants to acquire a taste for anything.
"In medias res - a place, an action, a question. The diction is interesting: 'perturbed' 'ficus', 'shallow bluster of seduction', the syntax teasing and sustained. The tone is light, a touch breezy even. It sets out a subject then explores it, that is all, like a piece of fiction, but it is skilful and entertaining." --George Szirtes
air poem by Divina criticalpoet.org
the first word is on the tip of my tongue I can’t think of anything else
other than having lemon tea while I type my fingers away
contemplating the dreams that in the end have found a home
and the sun rising in my eyes things change
so I’d prefer to give it a name or a colour that isn’t yellow or orange
the apollos are dreaming about the cassandras and trying to figure out what to do with all the love
how similar how different how strange our hands are as we hold the air
"Very good beginning and ending. It may be that the passage in the middle about home and yellow or orange is not as important to the piece as the more blowsy apollos and cassandras., though their entrance is somewhat suprising. The diction in the best parts is clear, simple, tight."--George Szirtes
Bird-dog, Bird-dog by Margaret Hemme The Waters
he’s a god fur flapping racing frantic circles leaping earth green and gravel fringed by wired walls
he hears the blackbirds inky digging dots coating oaks fluttering far no fences free, and one
has landed startles rises from his lawn too late
the rubber ball is black now bouncing and he’s trained to grab it from the sky
bird-dog, bird-dog good catch, but I’d rather watch it fly
"It's the writing rather than the whole shape here that seems particularly good, the second verse with those inky blackbirds. I think the last verse thins the poem a little, the tone maybe a touch flip. It is the observation that is the strongest element of the poem." --George Szirtes
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Oct 20 09, 19:23
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place Rain by Anna Yin Pen ShellsYou don’t pray for rain in mountains. It comes and goes as if to home. The soil is forever soft to preserve its depth. Leaves unfold themselves to hold each drop. Sometimes rain wanders in clouds, others it runs into rising streams. At the end of each cycle, you always hear it singing all the way home, kissing leaves, tapping trees. Still, some drops stay longer on the tall branches until the sky clears. All of a sudden, a wind blows, they let go - A light shower surprises you sitting motionless under a phoenix tree."When I read this poem, I immediately knew that it would be my first choice. That's how beauty prevails itself. The poem begins with a strong statement that rain frequents the mountain as if the mountain is its home, and ends with an unexpected experience caused by the rain." --Majid NaficySecond Place Forbidden Lullaby by Walter Schwim Mosaic Musings Congrats Wally!!!Let my thoughts tonight caress you as the moon does to the sea with a rhythm slow and ancient in a flowing liquid glee.
May the cycles of the cosmos herald rising of a tide that will float us off together on an everlasting ride.
Hold me tightly as we venture on our voyage though the skies so my warmth will still surround you when tomorrow you arise.
For by daybreak I must leave you to atone a life of sin until turning of the heavens drops a key to let you in."This is a smooth satirical poem about a "forbidden" love. To understand the poem, the word "thoughts" in the first line is crucial. The image presented in the last stanza leaves us with a sacrilegious question: Who is living upstairs? A generous God in the heavens or the narrator who wishes to drop the key for the lover awaiting downstairs?" --Majid NaficyThird Place Without salt by Mandy Pannett The Write IdeaIt’s about waking up to the sound of a bird, a bird for all birds in the tree outside, with snow on the sill, an air that is easy to breathe.
And I’m still back in that favourite time – that crummy old flat in Washington Square, squatting with poets on cold brown steps, bright as the stars but hungry for syllables, words with a passion and meat.
But it’s winter in Paris and years since that and they’re all long gone, those rebels are dead. I’m missing the salt, need words that are tough, am tired of courage, go on."This poem rests on memory. The bird that awakes the poet brings back the memory of the poet's youth, hanging out with fellow poets in Washington Square. I think the poem does not need the last stanza and should end with the line "with a passion and meat." --Majid NaficyHonorable Mention
Bills and Yet More Bills by Christopher T. George FreeWrights Peer ReviewBills arrive uninvited at our doors predictable as death or, erm, worms.
Bills! Don’t like ‘em! Take ‘em out to lunch–we’ll go Dutch!
Bills on ducks and platypuses, the joke my grandma told about Bill Sticker. . . or was it Bill Poster?
Will Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill, Bill Clinton. . . the bill you paid for that Knickerbocker Glory.
Bill Bailey, Bill the Bailiff, the Old Bill, Portland Bill, Bill the Cat, Bill Bixby, Bill Blass, Bill Cosby.
Mein Gott! Tot up the bill for that lot! Rat-a-tat-tat, empty billfold.
Hey, Bills, I’ll take a raincheck, ha ha ha! Oh, mmmmm. Hi, Mr. Death, Bill Collector.
plastic cut-outs of Elvis. “Blue Hawaii.” How will I ever pay the bills? Aloha! Her facility sits south of Loch Raven:
Donna and I on our wedding day in a Rolls chauffeured round the reservoir, under massive pines; 40 years before, my family arrived from
the UK: huge gray fish nosed beneath the dam. Catfish, bottom feeders, corporate clowns. Deeper depths. What’s the answer–to drive
Mom and myself into the deep of Loch Raven? Yet, how quick would the end be? I gnaw my lower lip, pour another whisky, drown.
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Oct 22 09, 04:11
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Group: Gold Member
Posts: 1,621
Joined: 18-August 05
From: Johannesburg, South Africa
Member No.: 127
Real Name: Beverleigh Gail Annegarn
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Jox
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Hello Wally and Cleo! Is this the first time we have a SECOND!? CONGRATULATIONS WALLY! How wonderful! Absolutely superb! I am thrilled for you! I seconded the nomination poem remember!!!!! I knew you were a winner! Bev
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Oct 22 09, 05:50
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Mosaic Master
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
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Hi Bev, No - actually Eric (Merlin) placed second in Dec 2007 with his poem, Northland Solstice. Here are the placements MM has experienced since joining the IBPC in Jan, 2007: JaxMyth's "Drought" - HM in April 2007 AMETHYST's, "Masked Artwork" - HM in April 2007 Kathy's "Jackie" - 3rd place in June 2007 Merlin's "Once Upon a Time" - HM in Sep 2007 Merlin's "Northland Solstice" - 2nd place in Dec 2007 Aphrodite's "Time Gone Cold" - HM in Dec 2007 Peterpan's "Zambezi Storm" - HM in Sep 2008 Marc-Andre Germain's "At a mall in Bangkok" - HM in July 2009 Psyche's "Bereavement" - HM in July 2009 Thoth's "Forbidden Lullaby" - 2nd place in Oct 2009 Excellent! You can read this poem in the 'Winning IBPC poems in the IBPC archives and in the current forum here too. Great stuff! ~Cleo
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Oct 22 09, 06:06
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Group: Gold Member
Posts: 1,621
Joined: 18-August 05
From: Johannesburg, South Africa
Member No.: 127
Real Name: Beverleigh Gail Annegarn
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Jox
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Thanks Cleo!
You must be very proud!
Bev
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Nov 24 09, 22:30
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place Certain in my Immortality - 1947 by Alice Folkart BluelineThe park public pool, huge and blue, even in polio season my favorite place, everyone taking the same risks equally, and the wise lifeguards, maybe sixteen at best shouted, little girl, little girl, get back to the shallow end.
We couldn’t see the polio germs in the blue water, nor clinging to our sun-reddened backs, nor beaded on our eyelashes, nor between our little toes, so we paid no mind to the calls of ‘little girl, little girl,’ and went on swimming where the water was darker blue.
Maybe those polio germs got some of those kids, maybe the blond boys with freckles on their noses, the ones who had water fights at the other end of the pool, the ones who also didn’t listen to the life guards’ shouts of, “Hey, guys, knock it off! No water fights.
Maybe those polio germs got the fat lady in the flower-petal swim cap, or the old man with the belly as big as a whole baby pig, or the skinny old woman, all angles like an erector set, but they didn’t get me and they didn’t get the life guards and I swam every day that summer, certain in my immortality."Polio is associated with water. Remember FDR. While sailing in Canadian territory in 1921, he fell into the water. After getting on board he felt a chill, and in two days, was paralyzed from the waist down. The narrator's memory belongs to 1947, when the polio vaccine was not yet available. Now that swine flu is circulating, there is one more reason to relate to this beautiful and meaningful poem. Perhaps the poet is being ironic, because in spite of imminent danger, she speaks of a sense of immortality. Nevertheless, the polio situation is similar to any other risk-taking experience that we face in life. We usually cross our fingers, hope for the best, and assume that the misfortune will not fall upon ourselves." --Majid NaficySecond Place String theory (Shrodinger’s coffin) by Jessica Haynes Moontown Cafe breathe in and out, ribs up and ribs down like a flexible cage
It’s strange, at least I think, how many pretty phrases English has for ”dead”.
so maybe if string theory can be trusted (my heart on a broken thread) if I never see you lying there (skin like lilies after frost hands like too soft marble) maybe if I never hear the words (passed away, to a better place so sorry, such a tragedy)
maybe I can bring you back; if I can only choose which thread to follow which one to tug like yarn in a labyrinth I’ll string it through the darkness so you can follow it home."One does not have to know the "string theory" as a mathematical theory for describing the properties of fundamental particles or Erwin Schrodinger, the Austrian physicist, in order to enjoy this touching and whimsical poem. Our poet approaches the question of "death" similar to the views of my countryman Omar Khayyam, with the difference that Khayyam sees the fate as a puppeteer and our poet as a modern physicist. The ending is especially playful, when the poet wants to shake a string through which the deceased can find his way back home." --Majid NaficyThird Place Without salt by Sarah J. Sloat Desert Moon ReviewRorschach of the laundry sack –
I pinch your bottom and some see the long maw of the crocodile in a shadow play
or a primitive insect, a locust, maybe a mother who won’t let go.
Little intimate of the bedclothes, into your muzzle go rags and nightgowns, trappings and briefs,
gnawed but not pierced, not discussed, not disclosed.
Could you speak, your voice might be twang or chirp, but you come from the church that touts
shut your trap as first commandment, a monk’s tongue sworn to silence.
When your joint snaps, when it rejects resting ajar, all that is conjured is the clack
of a castanet, terse, reluctant, a foot stamped to discourage dance.
Second cousin to the mousetrap, tense and cunning as a Gemini, you’re yin/yang with an oral fixation
though upside down on the clothesline, your silhouette
reveals the inverse, a contraption that needs both to take in and keep,
the house’s clampdown, the control freak."'Rorschach' is a psychology test named after Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychologist, who showed his subjects standard inkblots to analyze their interpretations. When I read this well-crafted poem for the first time, I did not know of Rorschach, and yet I felt that the clothespin described in this poem is itself being psycho-analyzed." --Majid NaficyHonorable Mention
‘Appy ‘Our by Stuart Ryder The Poets' GravesA week an’ a day shreddin’ me soles ont’ Pennine Way. Back int’ town,
straight tut’ pub: order some rolls – “Good ‘onest grub”. Pints, get ‘em down!
Well-oiled, me legs lollin’, Ah lounged, me mind mullin’ o’r background cha’ – simple but good n tha’…
then our fittie barmaid with flut’rin’ eyes an’ ‘uge tits says Ey-oh Stu! Stands o’r me wicked like, but’rin’ bread an’ Ah risk a kiss. She does, too.
Pink slabs of ‘am wi’ a garlic mayo. An’ when she gives me a refill, a golden sunbeam glances off me ‘ead.
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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Jan 17 10, 20:29
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Mosaic Master
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
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First Place Manufactured to Perform by C. Albert criticalpoet.orgI love how my organs are shaped the same as anyone’s, manufactured to perform: a heart that drums, filtering twirl of kidneys, liver, lungs that bellow on.
I hate how weak my machinery is that a noise of germs, single-coated parasites, scatter harmony. My tortured body has become parts upon my bed. Nowhere that doesn’t hurt, except my funeral.
What is it that comes back, silent as air, to lift an invalid? Not heart, liver, kidney, lungs, but a tenacity within the drum, the twirl, the bellows."I chose these four poems randomly as I was reading all poems alphabetically. To my surprise, not only do all four selected poems speak about the issue of death and dying, but, somehow, they also make up a whole and complement each other respectively. The first poem sees human body as a piece of machinery with a drumming heart, filtering kidneys, and bellowing lungs which only the tenacity of its parts can protect it against disabling germs." --Majid NaficySecond Place Night Sepia by Tim J. Brennan About Poetry Forum The first thing I do to awaken is turn to music to subdue that time when the strange bird sings its own dark song, gaudy among dream flowers
each night seeds of my past are scattered from shadows in the countable hours between saneness or sickness
sometimes my mother at the foot of the bed in her night chair— she waits almost every night for mourning
sometimes Chopin is at the window composing his Preludes, half listening more to his third doctor than to my personal requests for a requiem
old teachers: Richard speaking of Canterbury in his frog voice; or Elizabeth, tall & brittle, white & stork like, urging me to write about art and singing or music
“just because you’re no good at either three, don’t mean your writing can’t be”
like hummingbirds within me, like small kisses
wondering where I’ve been, where I’m going, and asking why I still hold pictures of people I know longer know"The second poem is wild. It speaks of a patient who sees Frederic Chopin as well as heroes of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales at bed." --Majid NaficyThird Place Searching by Witt Wittman SplashHall PoetryContemplating the disarray of the bedroom, I picked up one paint-splattered shoe. You always wore your good clothes when you decided to tackle a project. Good clothes became work clothes, yet you never wanted anything new. I tossed the shoe into your closet; that was all I could do.
Wandering into the den, I plopped into your easy chair, slipped my feet under the crocheted blanket. Our daughter made it for you, but it wasn’t comfortable. I don’t belong here in your place.
Throwing off the blanket, I sat on the floor and looked at your puzzle board― pieces in piles of greens, blues, tans― the edges completed. I should pick it up and put it away, but the den would look bare without it.
I strolled onto the porch, our favorite place to sit and play. Still learning after all these years, you were always thrilled when I won in dominoes. Spider webs decorate your chair, not quite covering the holes burned there by your ever-present cigarettes.
I lean on the railing, seeking more signs of you."The third poem is written from the point of view of a survivor searching for the signs of her deceased husband in different objects and corners in their old house." --Majid NaficyHonorable Mention
Tree Planting by Christine J. Schiff About Poetry ForumIt is tree planting time again, this time a Kauri for Ann. Some people die slowly, day after day as they live. Some die quickly after living too fast. Ann died gently as she had lived. There was time for us to talk, with the quiet ease of old friends about her favourite tree.
Together we had planted in the past trees for others, now it was time for her to decide which one I’d plant alone in her memory. The Kauri grows slowly, lives for a thousand years. She said the wind would whistle though hers, and so it does, so it does……
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"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 RingsCollaboration 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. KanterNominate 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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