IBPC Winning Poems, 2008, Congratulations Poets! Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for January 2008
Judge Fleda Brown
Congratulations!

First Place

The Bottle Tree
by Allen M. Weber
Desert Moon Review

I was so proud, Mama, to get that robe, to help
fashion a cross with Hale County's finest men.
They let me have two swigs of shine and load up
Papa's shotgun.

That boy was kneeling on the hard-swept floor
below a char-drawn likeness of Jesus.
In a rightful fury, his ma'am fought like three
big men; her sorrow bit like a sour bile
into the roof of my mouth.

We dragged him to their bottle tree, and Mama,
those bottles made a sucking sound and poured out
colored moonlight at our feet. We staggered about
grinning like fear

as someone shot the barking dog, cackled when another
tore down the damp unmentionables that fluttered
on a single taut line.

As the rope was drawn around a limb, too near
a hollowed gourd with purple martin eggs,
I raised my hood to throw up supper on my boots,
then helped to paint a home with kerosene
and fire.

Since then my children raised up children, who play
with brown-skinned ones; and those who'd force it otherwise
are mostly hair and bones.

But southernmost branches caught the flames that night;
their splintered wounds still bleed. The heat-shocked
glass still takes my breath, to howl for reckoning. So

the animals keep wary: deer won't rut, dogs won't
lift to pee; and until I too go on to Hell,
the martins may never come again.

A child's experience, in the child's voice, of being allowed to join in a lynching--the subject could easily turn cliched, but this poem manages to keep a hard light on the memory--the sour bile, the bottles in the tree. The scene comes vividly alive. The martin's nest, full of eggs, just above the head of the child throwing up witnessing the horror--is a brilliant focus for the poem. It's the martin's nest and the skillful control of rhythm that charms me, here. --Fleda Brown



Second Place

Goose Step
by Lois P. Jones
Pen Shells

The Goose-Step
. . . is one of the most horrible sights in the world,
far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. --George Orwell

He loves to goose-step in her parking lot,
fluorescent light casting the stage
for Dachau. He grins in his brown
skinned suit, marvels at the way the Germans
treat him like a countryman. Loves the coarse
consonants of their commands, the wild sex
with the German girl he'd had on the road to Spain.

He wanders through Jewish graveyards to feel
the faded dates of the tombs. A pastime,
in the way that stepping is his pleasure
in the darkness. He loves the swastika,
tells her about its ancient origins, the dotted quadrants
of the Hindus, the Neolithic symbols 10,000 years
before Christ. "A tradition" that dates to the 17th century,
the Prussian army stepping on the faces of the enemy.

She finds him aesthetic, like the tall leather
boots of the Reichswehr. Tries to think
about his love of flamenco, the dark hollows
of his song unbedding a command. She knows
to pass under him is the terror
she needs. He knows to pass over her

like another graveyard. She prays the neighbors
are not looking. Begs him to stop but he smirks,
lifts his legs higher and higher. A sign of unity
like the men who stepped around Lenin's tomb.
It says that man can withstand all orders
for love, no matter how painful, how ludicrous.

A tightly controlled, dense poem that in its language evokes the goose-step itself. I like the way this poem moves from the image of marching (under the fluorescent light, scarier still!) to all the ramifications of the love affair, from flamenco dancing, to wild sex, to the study of gravestones--all at the emotional pitch that the word Nazi implies. "She finds him aesthetic" says everything we need to know about their relationship, and about what can drive people into inhuman behavior. --Felda Brown



Third Place

The Cardiologist Has a Word with Us
by Yolanda Calderon-Horn
The Town

Cold fingers prowl my spine
even though no one I know is
touching me: nothing doctors
can do. Not a thing. I brush

fingers on one sister's elbow,
greet my son's shoulder with mine.
Another sister clings to mami's hand.
My husband embraces me, lets go;

embraces, lets go. I call the rest
of my siblings in Chicago. I just
say it. I leave the hospital knowing
little about what comes next and too

much of what came before. Days after,
I'm a Radio Flyer covered in snow.
The body and mind lug its brood.
When I walk by young gals at the office,

endlessly pigging up their darling lives,
or the elderly neighbor shifting dust
to the street, I want to grab normalcy
by the collar, ask: why did you dump us?

I think of mami who has the right
or should raise her voice to suit,
and wonder if the phantom of the opera
will have untrained notes trapped

in my stomach. I go to bed trying
to sort fear from anger, resignation
from gratefulness, faith from hope.
I awaken tangled with pipes of the smoke.

I want to wish papi a feliz ano nuevo
the moment I walk through his door-
but the unpredictability of his failing
heart gobbles happy out of terms.

I stand by the fireplace hoping
the ice-storm will melt. Minutes later,
the hearth inhales moisture out of words:
my tongue is heavy like cooled clay.

I like the way this poem slips up on the sorrow, embedding it in the details before we understand its source. The Radio Flyer, the neighbor shifting dust/ to the street, the coworkers "pigging up their darling lives"--the images skillfully keep us one step away from the actual event, the one that matters. The poem stands in its length and its quatrains as testament to Emily Dickinson's poem that begins, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." I am particularly fond of "The Cardiologist..."s last two lines, the way the poem ends with "cooled clay." --Felda Brown



Honorable Mentions

Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!
by Guy Kettelhack
Desert Moon Review

Let it go? Vapid palliation! --
which at best can soothe one
into thinking there's a truth quite
simply to be had, if only we'd get
calm enough. Stuff it: here is
what I know today. I've got a cold
I'm almost happy won't too quickly
go away: I've just ingested
chicken broth with matzoh balls --
Balducci's tasty anti-flu soup (lower
east side wannabe) – and I've been
on a spree of fantasizing lightly:
watching Turner Classic Movies
circa 1933: and it's as if a Cupid
had alighted on my knee, to entertain
me with this possibility: that
someone full of glow whom I have
just begun to know might turn
into a Huck, or Jim -- I do so very
much like him. It's quite a mix, this
pile of pick-up sticks that one
calls one's perceptions: full of
chicken soup deceptions: but
nothing's here for seeing that we
haven't dreamed up into being: so
allow me Jim, or Huck, and I will
be the other shmuck, and it will
half be daring, half be luck,
if we, out on our raft, get into --
something -- ineluctable.


Red Cap
by Sarah J. Sloat
Wild Poetry Forum

Tarry, stray,
and you fall into his lap:

a pillory and bellylaugh --
for that is the plunge of strumpets.

Down the hatch lie rooms
strewn with wool, stockings

and children's shoes,
lined with moss and stumpage.

No surprise to hear
the village hiss, complicitous.

Gossips consider it
no mystery how girls

go down, kindling appetite,
when the wolf asks what you have

under your apron, little
mistress, and you reply --

wine and tarts, old beast,
a ruse, a rosebud.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for February 2008
Judge Fleda Brown
Congratulations!

First Place

Unmarked Graves
by Lois P. Jones
Pen Shells

All I want is a single hand,
A wounded hand if that is possible.
--Federico Garcia Lorca

Beautiful man, with your brows of broken ashes
and eyes that migrate in winter,

a hollow in your hand
where the moon fell through.

I could have kissed your mouth,
passed an olive with my tongue,
the aftertaste of canaries on our breath.

But the shriek of the little hour
is spent, and there is no road back.

The day it happened
there were no good boys
or dovecots filled with virgins,

just a sun imploding
like a sack of rotten oranges,

the scent of basil
from the grove near your home
and the piano that still waits for you.

No one will remember
the coward who shot you,
but the sheets,

the white sheets you sail on,
coming home.

I'm drawn to this poem from the first line--the "brows of broken ashes"--and continue to be delighted and surprised line after line by the fresh metaphors. This poem is all poem. It holds me aloft in its language. The death of Federico Garcia Lorca is made present, a "sun imploding/ like a sack of rotten oranges." I can only quote lines from this fine poem, which deserves not to be rendered into prose. The poem's ending is brilliant, "but the sheets,/ the white sheets you sail on, / coming home." How much more perfect can an ending be, for Lorca, and for us? --Fleda Brown



Second Place

1980
by Mitchell Geller
Desert Moon Review

Before the South End had been gentrified
and not a single latte had been brewed
on Tremont Street's still raffish, dodgy side
there was, on Union Park, an interlude

of wanton joy we later saw collapse;
a brief, Edenic interval of grace
before the second-hottest guy at "Chaps"
bore lurid lesions on his handsome face,

and soon, in weeks too sickeningly swift,
required -- at thirty -- that bony white cane.
Six short months and his mind began to drift,
in gaunt, enfeebled, piteous waves of pain.

We soon, alas, grew used to sights like this,
the idyll having changed to an abyss.

When a sonnet is good, it holds in a great deal of passion, using the struggle of the lines to keep it from flying apart in anguish. Here is a poem, maybe the only one like this I've seen, that eulogizes the "Edenic interval" before AIDS began its rampage in the gay communities. The voice in the poem is authentic, the language interesting ("Tremont Street's raffish, doggy side") and sometimes perfect--"that bony white cane." Although the couplet feels weaker than the rest, the end-rhymes "like this" and "abyss" do exactly what they need to do, pull us into the darkness. --Felda Brown



Third Place

Séance
by Adam Elgar
The Writer's Bock

I

Is anyone there?


Yes

In the scent that purrs
along the folds
of these old clothes

and in the sting
of happiness
remembered


Gather round

Interrogate
the tender fossils
heaped in this casket


splinters
from a translucent slipper

feathers
from a drowned lover’s wing

teeth and fingernails
hinted against the skin

a trace of distant birdsong

missing missing

an inheritance of knives
and so many kinds of hunger

over everything

lies a patina of stifled rage


We are this also

II

Is anyone there?


Of course

Commemorated
reverently framed
too intimate with God

Look how he shoulders faith
like a loaded rifle
certainty at odds
with memory’s sepia smudge


Here they all line up
these dry and bone-hard joys
fit for hate-darkened lovers


It all begins at dead of night
a whimpering boy
sure only of sleep
and danger


We are that also

I can't say exactly what the narrative of this poem is, except for the séance, but I'm delighted with where the short stanzas take me. As in a trance, I'm listening for what's missing--all the kinds of hunger and of rage that we're made of, that we've stifled, commemorated, even. The poem "purrs/ along the folds/ of these old clothes" to touch on, to barely suggest, what one enters a séance to obtain--some connection with the world just out of reach, the one that is like a loaded rifle, which probably resides within us. The whimpering boy that ends the poem is, the poem tells us, the beginning of what's stifled. --Felda Brown



Honorable Mentions

Black Man Carrying Alligator Briefcase
by Bernard Henrie
The Writer's Block

Only I know how my heart feels,
to lose from the beginning
and gain slowly, to give away
with both hands.
To enter rooms that fall silent.
The withering looks
and absentminded curiosity.
I listen, but fail to speak.

The cascading loneliness,
the deluge of expectations,
the grades and judgments
which leave me empty.

The feeling is not new,
but expressing the feeling is new;
I write more often in my diary book,
scribble to myself, gawk at myself,
fix a permanent record of what I know.

I smile like a man from the country
wearing the wrong clothes in the city.
Or when you leave work early
but miss your train and rest
on a bench in the idle station.



Hawaiian Chicken (not a recipe)
by Alice Folkart
Blueline

A fine flock of feral chickens
flutter and budget beside Pali highway.

Feathers ruffle, rusted by the rain
downy breasts blackened by mildew.

Rooster-king alert, proprietary, bright-eyed,
herds wind-up chicks toward the hen-harem.

Tiny brains in weensy heads search out
tasty tidbits, wriggling worms, juicy grubs.

Scratching, slicing with skeletal yellow feet
in the rotted leaves at the very edge of tangled forest.

Raging traffic roars a foot away,
as unreal to them as distant galaxies are to us.



Stoma
by Laurie Byro
About Poetry Forum

The bag my mother carries coos
like a muffled baby owl. She hides it on
her side like a purse with gold and silver
coins left to spend. When she moves it gurgles

like a sooty faced bird, more raven than eagle.
She is self conscious, afraid it will fly away
without her. She fears her life will be set loose
like a snake in its hungry beak. What is left,

after the surgeons cut part of her away,
is this graceless winged woman, a white gown
instead of plumes, a thatch of broken weeds.

The doctor has no magic tricks up his sleeves. She sits
on her nest incubating regret, hums while morning
streaks the sky red. She waits on her little clay throne.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for March 2008
Judge Fleda Brown
Congratulations!

First Place

Carol for the Brokenhearted
by Brenda Levy Tate
Criticalpoet.org

Can you hear the whole sky ringing?
I watch you stumble under its alleluia bell.
Your bare feet string a dozen prints
like pearls across the December grass.

These soles are your only stars, girl.
Hours, days, years - every last wound
you’ll ever endure - catch in the silty net
you drag behind, sans mermaids, moths

or seraphs' teeth. Your uncombed dreams
pour down your face, white as salt.
Listen, the sea is shifting in sleep.
It’s Christmas, and you are unparented

again. We both wait in this empty inn-yard;
a few stray gods quarrel behind their curtain.
Since they have been replaced, no doubt
they can discount one more failed prayer,

one more gloria in excelsis. A feather zags
its way to earth. This is only an owl’s trick,
girl. If you pick it up, you will be lost.
Can’t you feel the darkness gathering itself?

Midnight snaps shut, a padlock against hope.
Tomorrow is ordinary, as you must surely
expect by this time. Come into the pub-light
where a solitary barman offers decent ale

and music for all the bruised people. We are
among them, we whose homes and lovers
have blown like scarves over the world’s edge.
Here’s to absent friends, someone says.

I lift a mug; foam spatters my right hand.
A nearby church peals one o’clock and I
almost believe in something. Then I look down
at the tabletop reflecting your face. Its eyes

turn to knotholes, beaten into the wood.
Its mouth is the crack under a door.
You’ve damned me, girl, with a feather
saved from dirt. Now you wear it in your hair.


I could almost choose this poem for its one line, “we whose homes and lovers have blown like scarves over the world’s edge,” but there is much more to like, here. The poem is beautifully controlled by its four-stress lines—it is a carol, after all—but within the lines, many wonderfully strange turns. The tension of the darkness of the two people’s lives set against the ringing alleluias of the season does not include one maudlin line or image. “Midnight snaps shut, a padlock against hope.” Metaphor is smart in this poem. This poem is smart and polished. --Fleda Brown



Second Place

Bitch
by Carla Martin-Wood
Criticalpoet.org

Whatever poison runs through the veins of wolves
that draws them to some solitary place,
there to howl in altercation
with the moon,
runs burning through my veins tonight,
and restless,
sweating,
I rise and pace
this carpeted wilderness,
these rooms grown strange.

How many times have we mated
on nights like this,
rain beating
like the frantic hands of a jealous wife
against the windows?
How many nights have you fed my craving,
a mad thing
wild and tangled
with tears and earth
come crying in from the woods?
How many years have I let you hide
your anger and your grief inside me?
I have learned so well how easily
one passion is spent in another.
And is this love
that gorges itself,
then slips to some cave apart
to gnaw the bones of memory,
till it grows lean and hungry
once more?

I write this under a hunter's moon,
the years baying behind me
like a pack of hounds.


This poem lives up to its fierce title. It moves flawlessly into the craving, the mad passion that “gorges itself,/ and then slips to some cave apart/ to gnaw the bones of memory.” I am in the presence here of pure energy, no blunder of language in the way between us. I love “rain beating/ like the frantic hands of a jealous wife,” which may inform the poem, leaves us to guess that it does. Then the last stanza, which pulls us out of the immediate, tells us this passion is long past, but not at all, really. It’s after the speaker “like a pack of hounds.” What apt metaphors! --Fleda Brown



Third Place

The Soul's Active Ingredients
by Greg McNeill
About Poetry Forum

TS Eliot just paid me a visit.
He was tapping on an African drum.
He described the wasteland that he left in ‘65
and the wasteland in which he nows resides.

The drums, he said, contained embedded rhythms he hadn’t learned at Harvard
or in the litanies of London.
Rhythms that only accidentally made it into his poetry when he had a vision of discontinuity.
Rhythms, he said, that would stun Rimbaud and Donne.

He’s been drumming ever since he stopped breathing,
and if and when he re-incarnates
he says he’ll teach the poets a thing or two about how the senses interface
with the soul’s active ingredients.


I pick this poem because of its affecting unpretentiousness. When one begins a poem with T. S. Eliot, it’s not easy to be unpretentious. This small poem is like the tapping of a drum. The poem is about sound: the “litanies of London,” and rhythms “that would stun Rimbaud and Donne.” Just when I think I know how the poem will sound, the next line does something different. The poem pulls off its abstractions. It almost gets lost in them, but the plain lines, the plain language, keep my feet on the ground. Who would think that a poem could get away with “interface/ with “the soul’s active ingredients” without floating into space? Yet when I get here, I’m nodding my head, listening to the drum, and it’s okay. --Fleda Brown



Honorable Mentions

Remembering A City I Never Knew
by Don Schaeffer
Pen Shells

I remember the river
lined with stone steps,
each a tiny planet.
Neighborhoods of
stone harbors, orange
stone that shines in the sun.
Hot rain and
water everywhere poured,
dripped, flowing.
Life at the feet
of great trees
with festooned trunks,
spiced stains and powders,
trees are the roofs and
air the walls. I remember
statues of bone and ivory
with colored parasols and
sweet rotting smells.
How the people rise from
straw beds so gently smiling
with fingers full of petals.



Corn Shy
by Kathleen Vibbert
Pen Shells

By October, crows were corn shy,
blur of sun, yellow dust at eye-level.
I walk through each row, looking for mother
in spaces where kernels have fallen.
Days from death, she asked that fifteen
dollars be buried with her:

I wish there were something
to hold up to the light,
to feel the fabric of her cells,
a dollar green inside the earth,
laid out like her tongue,
silent and spent.



Love Through a Plate Glass Window
by Dave Rowley
Poets.org

I visit after closing time each night.
The dress she's wearing is faint, pink mist
draped over sculpted bones.
The fugitive turn of shoulder carves
a lucid arc towards me, awakens
the bloodline at my centre where tracks
of blue, silver, red reflected traffic
swoon and shudder through me.
Tonight the display lights hinge her lip
in a pout. Dear plaster cast
of someone long-lost and pale,
your mouth is a smudged afterthought
whispering secrets, your monologue silent
but discernable: messages slipped in coded lines
of designer clothing. Sometimes I'm there
when they undress you (I never dare to look).
The blind push and pull of my desire rubs
me wrong as crush hour crowds dissipate
leaving this thick window as our chaperone.
The wind blows cold here on the street.
Back home I fall dreamless, overcome
by grey plastered ceiling
as the grandfather clock hollows out the hallway.
Mornings find me drained, my face in the bathroom mirror
kabuki white, inching through fog.



Bo-Peep Tunnel
by David Phillips
Criticalpoet.org

Coarse roughneck navigators built Bo-Peep
to run the railway through to Hastings, west,
with sculptured portals hewn from sheep-specked hills.

Men gave their lives to progress through the chalk
but who can trust the glistening steam-blacked bricks
to celebrate the Irish hands who clamped
the rails to sleepers, oil-light springing shadows
over tunnel walls like Disney thieves?

And who can name the pair of Wicklow men
who bricked the tunnel wall one afternoon
and died that evening in a pointless brawl,
the Railway paying for their pauper graves?

No man is marked in any book, no worker
is remembered, but the collective noun,
a gang of navvies, lives in common tongue –
and a hill in Sussex honours men
who made a tunnel with a pretty name.



The Season of Science
by M. E. Silverman
Wild Poetry Forum

i. How to Explain What It is All About

Bees bothered by absence,
violin-hunger
for pollen to fill their days,
fields full of van Gogh,
golden glows and sun fire
of the katsura, the quick spread
of spice over lawns, wild
like the William Tell Overture—

wait. Hear me out: this is suppose to be
about blooms and the season of amore.


More what?
No, I meant—
here, let me try to explain.


But she is dressing,
and it is difficult to express
postulates and proposals
to pearls and powders,
to a bra and blouse, to the berry pit
of her tongue.


Look: the cold of night shadows
the countryside, bees far from the hive
will cease their search—


what? Listen. I didn’t mention drones, dear.
No, I didn’t know they only had one purpose.
I think we’re getting off track here—
no one knows why the life expectancy of drones
is 90 days. Oh,
that’s rhetorical.


Alright, forget the fucking bees! Let me try again:
a field with interaction has a magnetic moment—
that’s the science of electrons.
From a distance, an entity feels the force of another—
that’s the science for particles.
These moments do not need
to be temporary; we can be more
than a flyleaf on a book of nameless poems,
more than motel meetings and phone calls
that sound like a lute.
Do you understand? The season of science
is like everything that moves,
and sooner or later, will change,
changes, changed.


ii. Ode to Jasmine

The horizon’s hem
retreats, and a little light splits
between the curtains.
The night jasmines the room.


Between the double beds,
I left a bottle of cheap Chilean Merlot,
thick bread sticks still in the box, cold,
and an unopened gift in blue wrap.


The radio crackles between stations,
half-plays static and the heavy notes
of Schubert, slow and haunting—
you heard it if you know such seasons.


I lean in to swing shut the door and pause
to remind me of this ode
and the comma I changed
to a perfect period.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for April 2008
Judge Patricia Smith
Congratulations!

First Place

A Second Look at Creation
by Sergio Lima Facchini
Poets.org


Every biped, crawler and slitherer; every daybreak
fast-forwarding past the solstice; every afternoon that loses
momentum as it plods into evening; every child born
logical and cerebral, proud to be gifted,
bright as Andromeda and Cassiopeia; every planet in the universe,
comets, black holes,
their combined gravitational pull,
pulling on each of the five known elements: earth, water,
fire, air, and yellowing passion fruit;
every pediment, apse, nave, narthex ,effigy, oracle,
pyramid, every all-seeing
eye; every crease and whorl on a palm;
every hand that holds money and is diligent,
hard-working, closed to commitments;
all of those, along with matches, hydraulic presses,
arguments, salt water,
and the admirable number pi, took long,
sweeping strokes to be made, one by one,
as God was going through multiple life crises,
barely surviving each brainstorm.

How many times he’s come back from the brink of losing face,
such as when in the midst of a heated debate
over who made what and to what purpose, a sudden
gust of wind blew off his skullcap,
exposing a bald spot
high in the crown.
But for the most part he’s feeling good;
he’s glad it’s spring even if it means he must restart from scratch,
trying to convince things buried and burrowed
to come back up, saying tongue-in-cheek
it will be different
this time.

I immediately fell in love with this submission's lyrical momentum--building a narrative, building a defense, building a remarkably fresh view of an old story. I was intrigued by the poem's sweet science, hurtling toward a who-knows-what crescendo--and in the end, we have a tentative, warmly human deity struggling with his confidence, pulling in a weary breath and beginning again. I read every poem I encounter out loud, listening for the magic it works on the open air, and this one was a particular joy--deftly avoiding preachiness and predictability with bright, rollicking language. --Patricia Smith



Second Place

Spring Dance
by Brenda Levy Tate
The Critical Poet.com


Route 22 ripples to an axle beat as the red pickup approaches.
Puddles pulse, wheels veer, water arcs like a tide
parting before the F-150's tire hiss. Beer cans snicker
beneath ice-wire-wink.

Sleet coats cables, gone by noon. Pavement's a mosaic –
broken headlights, embedded pennies. Mouse bones crunch
under Goodyear studs.

First tractor out of the yard wallows with a pulmonary
wheeze in muck stubble. Field's black, twisted
as abandoned shirts. An old collie three-legs it
down the chain track because that's what he was born to do.

In a heifer-gnawed grove behind the loafing shed,
deer scrabble snow crust under bare oaks;
limbs scratch cloudskins. Mated robins drop
sky bits onto dull moss. New melt trinkles
and plishes off the gambrel-roof barn.

On the porch step, farmboy smooths his trout filament
between forefinger and thumb, feeds it into the Shakespeare
with a handful of hope.

The day flows around him – river and rock – while mother
sings from her clothesline, "Fare thee well, love,"
hazel gaze a salamandrine fire that burns what it touches.

He listens, furrows deep as plowed dirt
above his eyes; matches reel spin to wash-pulley creak.

Milkroom radio chatters about foreclosures, lost soldiers
and protests against a mine two counties away. Fishhook
snags the little fellow's thumb.

Long driveway rasps its monotone; gravel shoulders shrug
still-frozen clods into ditches. Muddy Ford swerves,
bumps over brushcut lawn, halts beside a lattice arbor
where rambling roses will soon explode like ruptured hearts.

Woman-song stops. She turns - sliced lemon smile -
carries her laundry basket, sets it down carefully.
Then she straightens to confront the truck, but won't glance
at her son. Not even once.

Out on bleeding earth, her husband inhales the dark
diesel, whistles off-key. "This will be no ordinary April,"
he assures his crippled dog.

Densely atmospheric story of earthly and personal rebirth; I was particularly drawn to the poet's daring, the deft creation of pinpoint phrasing that conjured EXACTLY the image needed. Snickering beer cans. Ice-wire-wink. The collie actually "three-legs it." And plishes. That is not, NOT in the dictionary, and it friggin' well should be. This is like the wide, opening cinematic shot, a huge story in a nutshell, and the last line resonated in a hopeful but chilling way. Geez --Patricia Smith



Third Place - TIE

Boy, Winter 2008
by Mike LaForge
The Critical Poet.com


You can't hear my voice, thousands of hands away,
smoke-shred and husky, broken as knuckles.

Boy, I've punched through pine and ribs, shouted
down the black mountain, bled on concrete, stone

and shoals of snowy paper. Today, there's a screw-
topped winter in my backpack, made of glass.

I sip from it when your telephoned voice cuts me
backward to your first clear word, your first

poor Christmas. I don't forget how your new fingers
gripped my wrinkled shirt, your birth-scars, your fear

of water and the loud sound. My hands wring circles
around this cold green bottle while your hands shape

crooked snowmen, frozen daddies. Warm,
they reach and touch your mother's face.

Soon, and I'll be there, you'll hoist your own pack,
my boy, strike hard into a greening world.

I was pulled headfirst into this tale of a repentant but hopeful father and his longed-for son--I wanted more, craved more, but I don't believe that was a shortcoming of the poem. I enter every poem hungering for a tale, and when that tale is as terse and straightforward as this one, I feel slighted. But I also feel that somewhere, in that rollicking parallel universe where the wishes of wordsmiths are paramount, the lives of these two people--especially the father, whose trek homeward is already scripting in my head-go on well beyond the poem. --Patricia Smith



Third Place - TIE

18 – Again
by Cherryl E. Garner
South Carolina Writers Workshop


Big-lipped mincing – mind’s eye –
that perfect Brown Sugar bass
boot thump at the light – only
my plasticchrome volume button
on the stock FM, black toggles,
turned me, 18-up.

Only cross winds in car cabin,
blue-shine Chevy, carried best
shrilly teeny angst, atomic-rocket
wrench, the turn of menses
into red power in free air
and wild, skin-pocked riot.

As someone who is trying (with varying levels of success) to reverse a reputation for rampant wordiness (not to mention sudden spates of alliteration), I've always envied conciseness that embraces huge vision. This little poem roots the reader squarely in a time and mindset; each little line is dense with atmosphere. And "...the turn of menses into red power..." Amazing --Patricia Smith



Honorable Mentions

None Chosen

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for May 2008
Judge Patricia Smith
Congratulations!

First Place

Sunday with Labrador
by Sarah J. Sloat
The Waters


My dog doesn't need the Church.

She wants hands; she wants
the vagabond, to lope and mosey
with the whole body.

My dog wants nothing to do
with bloodshed or fluorescent lighting.
She's here to unpack the grass.

Don't try to teach her property.

Like God, she's not industrious.

She goes along, eating what she finds.
Brown today, brown
all day tomorrow.

From the very first line ("My dog doesn't need the Church"), this concise little life lesson had me in its capable clutches. I loved its practicality, its tiny truths, its barely subdued smile. It's sparse and economical, but it backs a big wallop. I've shared this with merely a million people, and not all of them have dogs. And the last line is an unqualified classic, tolerating absolutely no argument. None whatsoever. Love it. --Patricia Smith



Second Place

What April in New York Is
by Guy Kettelhack
About Poetry Forum


You take your bony awkwardness into the April day --
too warm for May -- and yet the nearly naked trees are
barely March: well, that's what April in New York is.
Gold scrabbles here and there: forsythia: frail runty yellow
feathers sprout from scanty soil -- buttering a toss of corners
in the side-walked town: you stumble down the pavement
like a scarecrow with a tooth ache: pretty close to true.
(Another poem snatches pain from you and turns it
into point of view.) If you are to love this city you suppose

it can't be only when the two of you are pretty, which
Lord knows, right now, my dear, you aren't. Currents lurch:
bipolar -- hot/cold -- devil-zephyrs from the river twiddle with
the ordinariness of people -- tourists: bodies are a weight
and bother, something may be flourishing but it is not sweet
human pulchritude. The sun's too rude, and flesh too
blank and pale and bulbous and mistaken to be taken
seriously. Mysteriously, though, you've got to have a taste
of it: you take your aches uptown to Central Park --

decide to walk up to the Metropolitan Museum's art. All
the geologic outcrops! -- rocks and runners! -- gray
and unused to the light: squiggly growing green shoots
make it impolite to stare: they'd clearly rather not be there,
all embryonic in the glare. Damn the chronic pain of
everything! -- and yet it paints a sort of wash of interest:
splinters of a prickly sensibility that keep you walking and alert
and almost happy with discomfort. Grandeur of the Met
begets its usual surreal imperial effrontery: columns,

steps and quandaries of what to look at first: but
you are on a mission to do two things: see if your sore
mouth can eat a sandwich in the cafeteria, then walk into
the Pompeii bedroom painted gold and blue and red
you caught a glimpse of on your television set that morning
from your bed. The sandwich is a bust: leaves you scowling
(the ghosts of both your wisdom teeth are howling):
but oh! -- the room. Roman glory turns the page
and places you in habitable plot. Let the April day resume.

Here we've got the just the opposite, a wildly ambitious, cluttered sensory celebration that deftly captures the rhythms of the world's most complicated city. My favorite line, the one that gives the tale an intriguing twist, is "If you are to love this city you suppose it can't be only when the two of you are pretty..." From there, the momentum takes over, and--especially if you read this city setpiece aloud--it just gets better and better. --Patricia Smith



Third Place

Via!
by Allen M. Weber
Desert Moon Review


She likes to hike her dirty denim pants,
to teeter on a trash receptacle--
the daring daughter of a spectacle
that people pass without a sideways glance.

Behind an Appomattox five-day fast,
Miss Via's waking found her drunk and stark,
balled up inside her three-wheeled grocery cart.
She stretched and mumbled how she couldn't last

in cities of her selves. In store-front glass
she strikes a pose of someone else's life--
an author or a famous bastard's wife.
If beetle-black reflections scurry past

she'll trap them with the dash-like Emily.
And if she carries tomes about the town--
because there's no good way to set them down--
the critic cites her incivility.

Tonight beneath Graffiti Overpass,
she flings tomatoes at her drying work
daubed overhead. Ideas on a lark
lean Via west like tributary grass

before a petulant Atlantic : She
may lumber through the lower altitudes,
strip down the dress of urbane attitudes,
and clamber above inhibiting scree.

Out there she'll learn to taste untroubled air,
to make her water on unpublished leaves,
to rub her narrow rump on trunks of trees,
to go as Appalachian as a bear.

"She stretched and mumbled how she couldn't last/in cities of her selves"--lines such as that one fueled this marvelous character study. I was engaged me so immediately that the creative adherence to form was a secondary, unexpected delight. --Patricia Smith



Honorable Mentions


Fountain
by Douglas Hill
Wild Poetry Forum


I recall the spiral down the spit-fountain
in my father's dental chamber: I leaned
too long over the sucking shiny throat,
stalled, steeling against my return to
his adept hands wielding instruments
that would drill precisely into my fault.

I lay back dry mouthed on that baroque
black barbershop chair, as if for a trim,
scissors on the sides; resigned to the rest,
longing for a sip of water, some respite.
He turned secretively as he would in
the kitchen to decant a tumbler of scotch.

The pestle riffed a hard hissing mantra:
he urged it against the mortar, mixing
the mystic silver-mercury amalgam;
then into me flooded the moment of bonding
more intimate than thirst:
his soft warm fingers in my mouth.

I'm the dictionary definition of a daddy's girl, and this gentle poem--so full of specific detail, yet at its center a tender and intense moment between father and child--hit me right in the heart. --Patricia Smith


Marigolds
by Sally Arango Renata
South Carolina Writer's Workshop

Rust scallops the red wheelbarrow,
left too long in mud by the shed. Still,
it carries the white rocks that have to be
cleared from the garden - in time
they'll be spread as a path.

The handle on the short shovel is broken,
but held right, it cuts sharp through stones
and carries them to the mound of clippings,
weeds, the alien balls of bound roots.

The rose can use morning sun and composted
dung. I trim dried buds and yellow leaves,
more than one thorn penetrates my thin gloves.
I take them off to mound the soil

around the crown of root, leaving them off
to stick my finger in sandy soil
planting seeds. Peppers, tomatoes,
broccoli, collards, I'll can what I can't eat --

or trade with the neighbor for pears
when their tree is weighed, breaking,
abundant.

It was called a Victory Garden during the Big War
when sugar and meat were rationed, but the garden
for this war will be called Forgiveness,

and I'll surround it with marigolds,
so the souls can find their way home.

I love the simple instructive tone of this piece, its solidness and warmth. I couldn't decide if the last night was touching or trite, so--maybe because I'm a child of concrete and brick, pitifully inept in matters of the soil--I chose to be touched. --Patricia Smith

[Cleo_Serapis]

Hello all,

Just a quick note to say that the June results have finally been announced. Since I'm traveling, I've very SLOW connection speed so will post those results later this weekend when I get back to my home turf.

Stay tuned!
~Cleo

UPDATED, 03 August 2008

Winning Poems for June 2008
Judge Patricia Smith
Congratulations!

First Place

The Length of Never
by dublinsteve
SplashHall Poetry


How did the meadowlarks in Wichita
remain invisible for over two years?
Virgil showed up in the fourth grade
with five baby rabbits crammed into
a tan briefcase. Two died before lunch
recess, one squashed at playground's
edge when it took a wrong turn--Kevin
stepped on it--and two dissolved into
the wheat field from which they were
plucked in the first place. Nature seemed
bountiful that May. The walk home tripled
in length with another relentless search
for a yellow breast with the black V.
Disappointment quadrupled by suppertime.
We toured a grain elevator the next day.
I watched the wheat-dotted blacktop
fill with sparrows as my voice spilled
a current of nevers on the man with
the face like a dry riverbed. His voice
was smoke and gravel, "Never means
something will not happen forever.
You should not say that."

Out of the sun dropped a place named
Vietnam, then we moved to Ohio,
land of cardinals. Red spots dotted
the trees and bushes. Shrewd crows
attacked row after row of my uncle's corn.
Straw men were useless. Killdeers faked
broken wings, lured us into hope
and away from their nests. Groundhogs
burrowed under tillable soil, escaping
from one hole as we dug at another. Still,
the sparrows were everywhere. We shot
them with BB guns, for a man hidden
underneath a John Deere cap. He hated
hordes, demanded that we line bodies up
for the count. As dust and slivers of husks
floated on his coffee he paid us for the
deaths, talked about the war and how
we would never lose. My voice was oak
and mint. "Never means something
will not happen forever. You should
not say that."

I was in Colorado recently and saw one,
a meadowlark. I know now of intentions
and accidents, of dark skies and unstable
ground, of red spots and guns, of dropped
grain that doesn't matter, of wars and when
to dump coffee. I know now that never
is a million sparrows later.

The first two lines of this riveting slice of narrative set up a dark and engaging mystery--and each tight stanza is like an unfurling slice of cinema--mesmerizing and crammed with color and heat. I loved the tale, and I loved the vivid search for an answer to the riddle. --Patricia Smith


Second Place

A Fall from Grace
by S. Thomas Summers
Desert Moon Review


Grandpa scales the fish before
he removes its head or slices
a thin line up its belly, spilling

blood and water. He lodges
his thumb deep in its throat,
between gills -- clenches

his fist around the skull.
Jagged tool, a spoon with teeth,
tears shimmer from flesh:

a rainbow ripped from the soft
air that lingers after morning storms.
The tail curls toward the sun. Lidless

eyes, still moist, leak disbelief.
This is death. Gills flare like butterflies
fanning purple wings. I ask

if it hurts. Grandpa says
Little bit, just a little bit.

Stark, concise and deliciously image-driven, this minute gem is lush and unerringly focused. The underlying tale grows larger and more complex with each reading--and with each reading, this poem feels like a gift on the open air. --Patricia Smith



Third Place

Outwitting Your Angels
by Dave Mehler
The Critical Poet.com


Use every animal ferocity be fierce as fire lovely fire
they are made of and as willful use blood cunning
fear shrewdly corporeal rightly and against them.
They will not expect it either hate or applaud you.
You require oxygen fuel sheltering sleep, you change in time--
alien, they do not--but twinned to you nonetheless.

Use that. Be the compact wolverine squat underestimated
harried by hunter pursued across tundra over rises
who turns and charges knock him off his high loud horse
the snowmobile his white wings over cloud froze high
even before he can pull rifle from sheath stare him down unscratched
unbitten till he will not no cannot shoot you even in war
as you turn away make him admire you ashamed of himself.

Be a virus relentless soulless machinelike repetitive
producing like kind impervious fruitful godlike and love strange
like that--no antibody will withstand no death touch you for long.

Certain light heat lightning hot white quick or black black black
he will shapeshift he you the muddy cornered pooch pathetic
you a mutt pup pissing down your leg neck up back down saying here take it

always outnumbered outgunned before you were born unable
unchosen without gift of speech a vague dream a bark a whimper
only canine teeth no power of thought really no imagination
as it should be truly understood they understand yet know
in the Presence even they must cover their faces
with haughty wings still they superhuman cry they other
laugh hear music you must be deaf to you uncomprehending

sniff the air circular back leg scratch at an itch unreachable
only skin deep. But think remember did He identify with
did He die for them? He outwitted he became the wedge
between you kyrie kyrie to your angel eleison you must look weak

must but the secret is weak is the weapon they in hoary anger
mirror horrible harbinge dark ancient awe guests, unwished for,
unanimal yes the doorway you put off opening the facade
hot cool cool hot layered the dog dressed up like death
but you couldn't know didn't imagine death and everything
you lost every buried bone come back to greet you.

The relentless meter, the urgency, the unyielding pulse of this poem was immediately addictive. I was hooked on its inevitability, the way it hurtled toward an ending that left me me short of breath. --Patricia Smith



Honorable Mentions


Spirit Catcher
by Catherine Rogers
Poets.org


What do you do when it's full?
I ask the proprietor. She frowns.
She obviously thinks
I'm not serious.

Most people don't have that many
evil spirits visiting their house.

The glass orb winks and twirls
on its thread. How many
are in there now?

They don't come here.

Not to this shop. Too many
spirit catchers hung in the window,
too much lucky incense adrift
in the still air. Runes and stones.
I take up an amethyst, sure to protect
against drunkenness, a gift
for the dissolute.

But what if--? She's doing
the books.

What if they foment
a demon revolution?
What if the last one in
is a rotten egg? What if
the shell cracks and leaks
its malice all over the parlor?

If we don't know
how many angels can boogaloo
on the head of a pin,
how can we number the legions
of lust and envy that can cram
themselves into this delicate sphere?

Too risky, thanks. I step
into sunlight. I'll just
have to handle my sins
one at a time.

One of those things that make you go "Ummmm....," a delightful, and slightly sinister, answer to a question we all wish we'd asked. --Patricia Smith


Flood
by Richard Evans
MoonTown Cafe


I thought if I waited,
if I left wine, small purple flowers
a polished coin, if I made secret prayers
and with rituals
blessed the dirt that would cake
your boots when you came,
then you would come.

I thought if I wept,
if I fucked with the thought
of your face masking the face of the one
who has taken your place
and made of my bones
a terrible shrine
then you would come home.

And I thought if I drove
my children away, and drove
myself mad, and cut through my palm
and bewitched the windows of your friends
with my watching -
or if I stayed numb, silent
and orderly, beached
and counting the sum of your acts
with white and black pebbles, one by one -
then you would come home.

Eight stars out
and the station is calling.
Not much to eat, the clocktower is gone.
And where the rivermouth was
now there's a market -
the people seem surprised
when it floods.

The building tension, marked by a growing and ill-fated desperation, wouldn't let me shake this one. --Patricia Smith

[Cleo_Serapis]

I've just received the results for the July competition and will be posting them in a day or two here in this reply.

Congrats to Xanadu (Linda Cable) for taking first place with her poem, Feast of Disappointments, representing Wild Poetry Forum.

Be back soon with the details!
~Cleo

[Peterpan]

Linda's poem is really worth all the recognition!!
Excellent!

Bev

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for July 2008
Judge Tony Barnstone
Congratulations!

First Place

Feast of Disappointments
by Linda E. Cable
Wild Poetry Forum


I have come to the potatoes,
paring them down swiftly,
chanting your sins to the sink
until I hold another offering,
haphazard orbs the color of old eggs
and I choke on the smell of mud.

A room away you snore,
clutching at visions,
dreaming of butter,
gravy and youth.

I have seen your belly rise, fall,
still aching for round things;
sweet breast of melon,
pickled cucumbers biting
your sun broken lips,
the rain taste of green grapes;
ever a man of appetites.

In the fields, you confessed,
pulled up my skirt
with no concern
for the fallow years.

Now we are about potatoes;
the ticktock of consuming
roots in silence,
ignoring the pull of the scythe.

During those blind years
we knew nothing of wasted nights,
two beds, pressed against separate walls.
I boil Canaan with turnips,
served up on wedding plates.


The poem is intimate, a lyrically overheard bit of memory-thought-consciousness. At first I worried that it might be too tight, too controlled, but ultimately found myself admiring the image rhymes (eggs with melons with breasts with grapes with potatoes with bellies), the cooked-up assonance and consonance of all those great monosyllables (hold, orbs, old, eggs, choke, mud), the way roots and fertility and the difficult emotional harvest, cooking and appetite and consuming waste all interact in the semantic shadow of the poem. The poem keeps singing in the mind after you turn away from the page--a struck bell. --Tony Barnstone



Second Place

Seventeen, Before the First Time
by Ange Law
thecriticalpoet.com


Shoulder pout like Harlow.
Inciting reaction,
mouth a buzz full of bees.
She slams a mirror door,
glass splinters- catch tongue.
Wonders what it's like to slash your wrists
flapper style.
Conjures scarysexy to suck
with heretic teeth.
In the garden, genuflects to the god of lipstick,
makes her mouth arterial,
backhanding red across the intrusive flowers.
Stalks through grass three foot high
desperate for knowledge of passion.
Lying in it,
grasps handfuls of green,
twists,
then it's...
his hair a catch kiss of curls,
his eyes dark as dejected pews on Sunday.
In a furnace face blast,
she orgasms spontaneously,
lets go laughing...laughing.
Scrapes shiny off the sun,
smears her body
with forty- eight shades of golden.

Usually, I find poems that use this particular bag of tricks are unsuccessful. Portmanteau words like "scarysexy" are thirty years out of date now, the substitution of parts of speech for each other is an e.e. cummings trick that's hard to imitate well, and the artificial and extreme compression that leads to a dropping of the personal pronouns seems to reek of the MFA workshop poem. So, why on earth does this poem work so well? It has a utter psychic wildness to it, a deep, archetypal vocabulary that tickles the unconscious with a knife, a relentless sexual pace, and gorgeous sounds. Maybe that's why? I love the fact that the poet has made these old, warped arrows shoot true. --Tony Barnstone



Third Place

Roots
by Ken Ashworth
The Writer's Block


When I was a kid, I never knew why
one leg breaks the whole horse,
or how a circle the size of my thumb
pulls the whole ocean after it,
but I learned all there was to know
about girls behind Brindle's barn
when Alice Paxton broke my tooth out
with her lunch box for trying to slide
my hand up her whithers and cop a feel.

I stood there in a moment of half disbelief
slivering my tongue in and out of the slot
that was now not-tooth, the taste of an old penny
strong at the back of my throat,

watched as she worried the hem of her dress,
smoothing and re-smoothing that spot my hand got to.
Her eyes began to well and she burst
out in tears, terrified I might have swallowed it.

We searched for it until dusk, scuffled clumps of
hay with our feet exposing the soft underbelly
of loam that was both not-earth and not-manure,

until there was just enough light left to make
our way down the fence line, fingers tipped together
across the top wire, both of us knowing that soon,
she would turn and disappear within a twist
of green corn rows and I would watch until
she became smaller than the stalks, then go on.

That night I dreamed the tooth took root
and grew into a tree like the one in the dream
of Nebuchadnezzar which covered the whole earth,
and I wove my way among its branches
to the one which stopped just at her window,
slipped inside sucking a wet handkerchief.

Smell of dung still fresh in my shoe treads
I slid in beside her holding my breath,
sifting her hair with my fingers, trying hard
not to wake her and to conceal the bulge in the maw of my jeans;
the medicine bottle where I kept the tooth.

This is a good narrative poem, lovely in its bones. It has wonderful sounds ("dusk, scuffled clumps," "tooth took root"), cool verbs ("slivering my tongue in and out of the slot / that was now not-tooth"), and the poet knows that the good narrative poem moves, that the story turns rhetorically, lyrically, narratively, or better yet, all three, as this one does. The move into tooth-root-tree dream is what made me fall in love with the poem, along with the perfectly right strangeness of certain lines. I don't know why when the protagonist climbs the world-tree into her window he's sucking a wet handkerchief, but instinctively I love that he's doing so. --Tony Barnstone



Honorable Mentions


Drowse
by Bernard Henrie
Poets.org


Sunburned
water lilies,
a dozen birds
fly up
stunned.

The cat moves
room to room,
stops.

Plums
flicker out.

Shiftless
radios turn off.

Afternoons
fall deaf.

I enjoyed the poem's small ambitions---just a little sketch, some atmosphere, some sound pyrotechnics, spare words and no words to spare. The cat and the plums and the ambition evoke William Carlos Williams in his Imagist/Objectivist phase, but the atmospherics I think recall more the small, gorgeous poems of Jean Follain. It's hard to write a good Imagist poem. A Chinese shi hua (poetry talk) says it best:

Plain and Natural: First master elegance, and then strive for the plain style. Nowadays many people write clumsy, facile poems and flatter themselves that they've mastered the plain style. I can't help laughing at this. Poets know that simplicity is difficult. There are poems that illustrate the rigor the plain style demands:

Today as in ancient times
it's hard to write a simple poem.
by Mei Yaochen

The lotus flower rises from clear water,
naturally without ornament.
by Li Bai

Plain and natural lines are best.

from Sunny Autumn Rhymed Language --Tony Barnstone



Aftertaste
by Brenda Morisse
Wild Poetry Forum


She sways to this half-tone
day, staggers like smoke on a tight
rope of discontent. The depth
of forever passes for lilies
in this muckheap.
She has no head for the world
and its free-for-all needlework
of bill collectors
and spiteful windows.
The floor is cluttered with bottle
caps and cans, so she drapes
the sofa on the ceiling and hovers
cross-legged and side-by-side
with the overhead.
If you ask me, she isn't a saint
although she's very photogenic.
Whoever heard of a pin-up saint
hawking pilsner? Her mother nagged
her to marry rich, but her heart
was never a cash register.
It's always been the beer: sweetish,
malty Munich and the drier,
hoppy Franconian. Her shoebox is filled
with bits of broken
jewelry: rhinestones and paste,
pot metal and silver. Can openers.
Hardware softened by careless
spools of wires, head pins, eye pins,
disheveled bracelets, wrong-way earrings.
Orphans in this box have a way of tugging
at heart strings. The ring is broken
in. Remember when they were head
over heels, before life warped the metal,
and marriage became too hard to wear?
The sum of her memories is tied in knots.
I heard she was run out of town, a bartender
with stigmata. It's not hygienic. Our St. Pauli
call girl resists know-it-all-gravity
and the attraction it mandates,
contradicts spiked heels,
prods her to wear a bra. Pompous gravity,
bombastic gravity, she says. I will walk
on water, I will stop time. I levitate.
Get over yourself!
She is younger than her adult children.
She prefers polka dot baring midriff tops.
Mardi Gras without Lent.

I was tempted to make this poem a winner because of its utter wildness, its relentless flow of metaphorical and surreal jabber, its swerving, unexpected rhetoric. Sometimes that craziness leads to a kind of mental disorder, mixed metaphors, a semantic slippage of adjectives that seem not exactly exact or exacting but certainly interesting. Add some sort of turn to the poem so it develops more, can or renew the few cliches (tugging at heart strings, head over heels), and this one could be a real keeper. --Tony Barnstone



Sleep
by Tom Allen
poets.org


As when an old moose
with wolves hanging
from his ankles and rump
and wolves grabbing
for his face
bulls his way bleeding
to the edge of the lake
and with all
his last strength
inch by inch
fights to get deeper in
until the wolves
have to let go
and at last he stands
up to his nose
in red water
and watches the pack
wandering helpless on shore
falling back into the trees
watches with eyes
from which terror
is draining

The extreme, elaborate metaphor is one that tempts one to say, "hold on, now" but ultimately works as a bravado move and makes this small poem work powerfully, with each short, packed line struggling down the page like the bull moose deeper into the water. Whew! And I thought I had sleep problems! --Tony Barnstone

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for August 2008
Judge Tony Barnstone
Congratulations!

First Place

Tsunami Prelude
by Brenda Levy Tate
Pen Shells


Salt water curls back - tongue against sky roof.
Mud sucks and hisses, salivary, raw red
gleaming to horizon like a muscle sheath.
It is miraculous, this wrenched ocean, sudden
absence of tide. Even gulls are astonished.
Thin cloud scallops edge emptiness. Blind bivalves
sputter and spout as I cross their wet bed.

Caught among flotsam, barnacled pine-limbs
point fingerbones. Impaled, a child's photo
grins grey, wavers. My own eyes (little changed),
bedraggled hair-bow, missing tooth. No acne yet.
I refuse to save myself. Beside a tampon case,
my jewel-box gapes, pink and broken. It may
have just given birth to something unnameable.

Storm petrels knife into the wind. To my left,
an old man bends toward a stained helmet;
three women on my right drape prom dresses
over their arms - lace bodices, tulle skirts.
Half-buried in silt, an Evening in Paris bottle
reminds me I'm allergic. But today's scents
are kelp, rust, blended fresh remains.

This is too large a harvest for one season.
Diaries with vinyl covers; teen dolls holding
tiny 45s. Worn saddle shoes (brown trim,
not the black I wanted). Oak cane - I know it
from my closet debris. Scattered costume beads,
brooches, safety pins, cracked glass goblets.
Decanter I once gave my dad for his birthday.

I stamp on a wedding ring with cheap
diamond chips. Circular imprint: perfect fake
clamhole. Dried-rose-petal dervishes blow
across cumuli. Ululations (ecstasy? anguish?)
roil heat haze. On the beach, girls' cries disturb
this universe. Freight-train-thundershake.
Tourists yell run in their language. Not mine.

Along a naked seafloor, silver leaps joyous
and unintelligent. When the rro-ooo-ll is called up
yo-o-onder. I'm not sure where I'll be, except not
there. The promdress ladies are gone, nothing left
but a mohair stole. I wrap myself in woolscratch,
recall Nana knitting its duplicate. Senior year.
It scrapes at my skin like an oyster knife.

I lie down, open myself.

We'll drown, the old man reassures me.

Foam gargles toward us.

That's the point.


The great strength of this poem lies in the care and interest it gives to description, especially in the wonderful and strange first two stanzas. I enjoy the physicality of the receded ocean like a mouth, the tongue of the waves curled back, the raw red mud like muscle sheath. Though the poet restrains him or herself from saying so, implicitly it makes the oceanic force of the gathering Tsunami a godlike thing, a great god tongue coming to lick the world clean of life. The second stanza gives us a picture of the flotsam that the narrator and others are gathering in the bed of the receded ocean---all the detritus of their lives, child photos, tampon cases, and especially that very strange jewel box gaping, pink and broken. It is a strange image of the mother-vagina that has birthed something unnameable. The red mud echoes the Hebrew for Adam ("red earth") and the vaginal jewel box gives us an intertextual echo of the myth of Pandora and just a hint of the Yeats' apocalyptic beast slouching towards Bethlehem. So the creation story of Genesis is joined to the Greek myth of the origin of monsters, which have birthed (it seems) this monster storm. Out of that monstrous beginning will come the apocalyptic end of the poem's little world made cunningly. Why does the protagonist stay on the mud to drown as the water gathers and rolls toward her, refusing to save herself, choosing instead to lie down and open herself? I don't know, exactly. Yet that strange ending, in which the old man reassures her that drowning is somehow the point of it all, has an instinctive rightness to me. Why resist the god-tongue's watery word? Why not drown in god and let him/her wash the things of your life away? What will remain then? --Tony Barnstone



Second Place

Living in the Body of a Firefly
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review


Cotton mouthed, hung over, I wake up in my sooty dress
somehow ashamed to be seen in the utter waste

of daylight. The barbecue with all those mint juleps
on the verandah was intense but I strayed too long on the edge

of a glass. I long for a quiet train trestle, wood and paint
chipping off, not those city lights where I am one of millions.

I'm not fooled by the low murmurings of the river,
cattails to luxuriate in, but danger in the deep-throated

baritone of frogs. Damselflies are entirely self-involved
and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds. Never mind,

there's safety in numbers. A neighbor has an easy split
in a porch screen and as I'm on a tear of wild nights

before I die, I've set my sights on their cathedral ceiling.
In the sway of tall grasses his youngest cups her hands

around me to pray. I am coveted in the moist chapel of fingers.
Tonight, I'll hang around until they are all half lidded-drowsy.

I'll skitter down to her favorite blanket where she'll wish
upon me like I am the last star falling, the last creature on earth.


I was engaged by this character who wakes in the waste of daylight in her sooty dress, partied out, smoked over, yet dreams herself a firefly leaving the city lights to be a light in the country, caught in the chapel of a child's cupped hands, a star falling to her at night, a fairy wish. Better that than to be a damselfly, "self-involved / and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds." It's magical, and utterly romantic, or more accurately, Romantic, in its division of life into innocence and experience, country and city, childhood and adulthood. As a critic I read back in grad school critic said, "Romantic poetry is a long walk into the sublime, and a short walk back." Who can really write a Romantic poem today and get away with it? Something about this poem's assured movement, its magical images, its tenderness, allows me to like it, because there will always be a Romantic in poetry, and the only question is the one that the moderns (especially Frost, Williams, Yeats, and Stevens) posed themselves: how to renew the Romantic impulse in a world in which the machines have won and the country has retreated to city parks and potted plants? --Tony Barnstone



Third Place

Surviving the Ugly
by Sandy Benitez
SplashHall


On a dusty dirt road
squats a rundown mosque.
Rumors point to a new
recreation center for soldiers.
I, an "infidel" disagree.
Blasphemy! To put American
spit-shine on its dingy blue tiles.

Escort duty--hours of sitting,
walking in circles without
a straight jacket. The sun above
Baghdad angrier here than back home.
Dropping heat bombs,
exploding on armpits and breasts.
Five days of wearing the same
sweat-stained bra. Baby powder
works wonders. A soldier
swears by Febreze; his trousers
going on a record eight days.

In the hooch, I thank God
for air conditioning. Say hello
to Mother Mary watching me
quietly from the blanket.
She doesn't belong here, in this
unfamiliar place. Still, she's
an acceptable battle buddy;
comforting me when nightmares
creep into my skull, ricocheting
horrors of war like sporadic bullets
fired in the air.

Suddenly, sirens scream,
"Duck & Cover! Duck & Cover!"
Channel 16 on the radio shreaks static,
"Help me!"
I can't understand a word.
Thunderous seconds knock me down.
A flip flop lands across the room!
Tasting hair and lint. Boom!
Wait for it... Boom!
Is there enough life insurance? Boom!
Will my children remember me?
Silence.
Except for my pounding heart.
A quick "Amen."

The siren returns,
chanting "all clear! all clear!"
Helicopter blades loudly buzz,
giant dragonflies gone berserk.
Always in pairs,
off to find bad boys
who played with daddy's rockets
when mommy wasn't looking.

Mother Mary calls to me.
"Sit down and breathe."
Offers me water; I sip, shake my fears.
We resume the evening
watching tv. Game shows; she beats
me at Jeopardy every time.
Relax.
Stretch legs, eyelids lower.
My toenails are horrible;
they need clipping.


This poem's portrait of the ordinary grimness and griminess of military life, punctuated by moments of extraordinary stress, could be the merest cliche, just a topical poem about (one assumes) the war in Iraq that relies on current events to lend it power and emotion. But it's not. I love the details of the poem--the soldier who sprays his trousers with Febreze (which I use to get the smell of cat piss out of my pillows and couch), the protagonist whose armpits and breasts are bombarded by the desert sun's heat bombs, the helicopters blading past like giant dragonflies gone bezerk. I felt that the poem faltered a bit here and there (I'm not convinced that the characterization of the enemy as "bad boys / who played with daddy's rockets / when mommy wasn't looking" is an effective irony). Finally, though, what sold me on the poem was the simplicity and psychological rightness of the protagonist's focus on that sweat-stained bra, a rightness which comes back even more powerfully in the thoughts which run through her mind as war zone life returns to its strange normality of television and Jeopardy after the bombardment ends: "My toenails are horrible; / they need clipping." --Tony Barnstone



Honorable Mentions


How Soft is the Blackness that Cannot Bring Me Joy
by Ellen Kombiyil
Blueline


Day dawns, bright as chrysanthemums.
I am balanced on the brink of the earth.
Somewhere else, light fades
on the edge of chalk-white cliffs.
I can taste them, dry as death.
Nightingales sing the last song of night.
If only I could graze your arm,
your imagined scent still clinging to the pillow.
I try to remember but not to think,
that's what Jesse Jackson says
when he remembers Memphis.
I'd like to adopt a philosophy like that.
Philosophy is meaningless when sun hits the pillow.
I was young when I met you bling-blinging at the party
to the sounds of revamped disco.
Night tasted of sweat.
You'd forgotten my name
because I wore my best dress.
How soft is the blackness that cannot bring me joy
you said, or something like that.
The elusive smoke of giddiness
crept into our heads
and love was like a funeral.
We fell through earth
and swam out upside down the other side.
Little Boo spelunked the forests,
convinced I was vanished.
I hadn't said au revoir or sounded a warning note.
Years from now I will write a song
and you will not hear it
shaking the forsythia, their drab bells
having forgotten your name.
Your name means 'ocean' or 'lake,'
or 'teeming with life,' or 'vessel,'
and I remember what water sounds like
only when it rains:
the river widens its mouth;
the forsythia sings hallelujah.
Ca ne fait rien,
it was so long ago and morning has sprung:
sunlight empties through porch windows
to echo in the parlor.


Although this poem tries to get away with one cliche ("Dry as death"), it's great strength is in the surprise and strangeness of its surges and shifts of image and mind. I fell in love with funny lines like "I was young when I met you bling-blinging at the party / to the sounds of
revamped disco," and surreal emotional images such as,

The elusive smoke of giddiness
crept into our heads
and love was like a funeral.
We fell through earth
and swam out upside down the other side.

"Philosophy is meaningless when sun hits the pillow," eh? Okay. And yet this poem's erotic, emotional journey is more about experiencing the Zen flash and holding back thought in a less discursive way, about the sound of water you remember when it rains, about sunlight emptying "through porch windows / to echo in the parlor." I like this poem's tenderness, and its very peculiar movements of mind and syntax. --Tony Barnstone



If Men Wore Lip Paint
by Bernard Henrie
The Writer's Block


I am an amateur of love,
but I will write a love poem.

I will say:

the moon is yellow as a goldfish
and big as the breast
of an opera singer.

No.

I would write about
the rich thighs of widows,
or an older woman burnished
by the meticulous night
and speaking Spanish
in loving tongue
to a younger man.

I will write for a heavy woman
sitting in an airport terminal, called
from a pasha couch in a garden,
a cumquat delicately placed
under her clothes.

Young women in summer dresses
half-hidden by a curved boat hull,
shirt fronts buttoned by men
who gaze as though saying rosary.

Rain passes into the night,
love grows old, poems fall asleep
in a chair.

Let me start again:

if men wore lip paint, breasts
and hips of women
would stain red.


This poem is a sweet, lyrical poem, and that's nice. However, what makes it interesting is its swerves, the quick shtick of magician's tricks, using syntax to surprise, pulling it like taffy into looping, loopy mental shapes. --Tony Barnstone



Seiren Song
by Steve Parker
criticalpoet.org


that made him yearn not for women not water's shades
some same cool and riversides
and rat-shatters and ice and low bursts

and green fingers stretching for his
only to drug as from strings words
out of him but to a night-sky whirled
in lofts within reach of that fishman

which spun from salt jism ancestors the while
alert to tugs the binary [fire] engine-putting
(slow as yawls) (moans of location) (mist)

over years over
humming shadow machinery
limbic waves of song

take me up he crieth take
in the Fall flowered as arrayed death dynamited

grey-flopping up murk-bearing O grim-aspected

fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen
casting of sparks, bearing of eggs, spuming of milt

some psentage've what hear've in dead channels
outflow've of a litl bang

your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting

but this, this


(O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia
thy mermids ist none so faire—
what outspankered prismes, what
neutic flutic combes soonest they bare)


Yes, I know that this poem seems to descend into gibberish pretty regularly, and that it has absolutely wild shifts in register (from the contemporary diction of "your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting" to the overwrought alliterative diction of "fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen" to the archaism of "O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia / thy mermids ist none so faire--").
But, wow, it's fun. And I like those twists of diction, shifts and frictions of reference and rhetoric. Finally, I like the author's great sense of humor, as he or she blends nonce words in with the archaisms. I don't know what "outspankered prismes" are, nor what it means to bare one's "neutic flutic combes," but the newness and oldness and weirdness of the language are such that, frankly, I don't care. I can guess. The poem seems to be a Frankenstein monster stitched together from odd literary corpses and the bloody pieces of the author's imagination, written in the ideogrammatic method of that crazy old fascist Ezra Pound. But, unlike far too many of Pound's Cantos, this monster's got a jolt of life to make its limbs twitch. Watch it rise from its slab and wander the countryside until it's pulled in by the siren song of the old man's violin. --Tony Barnstone

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for September 2008
Judge Tony Barnstone
Congratulations!

First Place

St. Louis Jim
by Henry Shifrin
Wild Poetry Forum


He picks his nose, index finger deep in the nostril,
face turned to the window. Passengers file by, stutter-step
to stare at the split-seam back of his gray suit jacket -- a camel's
back spreads its feather-duster hairs to wave
in the heavy breathing of the air conditioning.

His reflection a map in the glass. The creases in the cheek
highway east and west. Soot gives them a macadam glow;
maybe it's the settled ash of a cigarette. The rolling paper
in his chest pocket. The smell in the fibers of his jacket
and pants. On his bottom lip, a black spot
where the nicotine dies the way a dinosaur
drops off its carcass (a font the oil companies will

one day drill). His finger pops out -- it's a champagne-bottle
cork--no, it's a finger, dark from worming
in the space between seats. A momentary smile.
The sheen of a quarter. He licks off the bubblegum.
It's a fruity flavor. He sticks a hand in his back pocket. Compares
the taste to that of threads and Froot-Loop bits.

He tongues his fingertips. The sweetness. Then the salty taste.
The train stops, opens doors. He stands, re-buttons his jacket.
Curls his fingers for another view. Hitches up his beltless
pants, the waist a wrist too wide. Then leaps
through the closing doors. His pants fall
when he lands. The sight of half his butt,
the underwear torn to flap away from the right cheek.

His hands are two squirrels. They grip at the air.
Timidly jot down the trunk of his leg. Stammer for
a belt loop--or no, they want to survey the sidewalk.

Yes they pull up the pants. Up over the rear, a sidecar rounds
a hill, he swaggers the drumbeat of a sidewalk musician.


I enjoyed this portrait of St. Louis Jim, simultaneously tender and gross. This poem has a condensed, packed image-palette that swells with assonance and consonance and internal rhyme. Listen to its great language: "Passengers file by, stutter-step / to stare at the split-seam back of his gray suit jacket -- a camel's / back spreads its feather-duster hairs" --- don't you love those sounds? I also liked how the theme of mute musicality becomes verbed into the poem by the hands that "Stammer for / a belt loop," by the passengers who "stutter-step." Mutely, the poem comments on the speechlessness of the mentally challenged protagonist, and of his instinctive, natural self, picking his nose, licking old bubblegum for its flavor, swaggering to his own drumbeat. --Tony Barnstone



Second Place

Saturday
by S. Thomas Summers
Wild Poetry Forum


Sunlight contents itself
with treetops. Stones shawl
themselves with shade:

The boy across the street
has begun his chores: folding
night's remnants--draped

over the porch light, the mailbox--
laying each on a bathroom shelf
above cotton sheets, lavender

towels. His baseball mitt
has been crucified, nailed
to a front yard elm that dangles

a broken swing. His father
has hidden the evidence, buried
a hammer in the sandbox where

ants have begun to carve their
tunnels. There's work to be done.


I enjoyed the gorgeous language, "Stones shawl / themselves with shade," the folding of night's remnants, and the archetypal imagery of the poem--the baseball mitt crucified to the elm tree, the hammer buried in the sandbox. The domestic narrative seems transparent at first--the father crucifies the mitt to the tree because he wants the boy to work, do his chores, though it's Saturday, not a work day, and this dynamic of work against play is conceptually rhymed against the broken swing dangling from the elm (it would take work to fix the swing, but why fix the swing, if the swing is for play?) Still, I'm not quite sure why the hammer is buried in the sandbox. I'm glad it is, though. It seems that this is a poem whose logic might be more magical than rational. Perhaps I am attracted to the fact that the poem makes sense to me without quite making sense? --Tony Barnstone



Third Place
Sheer
by Tom Watters
MoonTown Cafe


static.
that, and roller skates

a small voice that
runs in,
leaves a wake

the receiver
becomes a monitor
distracted by a sexy beauty mark
dancing above that lip

the one she tends to bite

I feel corners of my smirk
lift as grass to the light
syrup of Pet Sounds
with a twist of Gil Giberto

I trace small ovals
on the back of my hand
veiled to earlier weather,
storms of malcontent

I scuff an obscured itch

in wonder of
foolish electrons

and parts

love of tiny transducers
that bring her
cinematically


Okay, I admit it--this is a peculiar poem, rather elliptical, hard to grasp. It is so lyrical and glancing that I'm not entirely sure what's going on in the poem. I think the poem is about a protagonist who is looking at a video of an ex-lover, or perhaps of a movie star he has a crush on. Thus, the language of the poem becomes all static and light and foolish electrons and tiny transducers and the woman who is brought to consciousness cinematically. I like the way the poem uses light to turn technology into lyricism. I enjoy certain aspects of the line breaks, as in the stanza:

I feel corners of my smirk
lift as grass to the light
syrup of Pet Sounds
with a twist of Gil Gilberto

The first line seems to stand alone, but then the next line modifies it: I feel the corners of my smirk. Then I feel them lift like grass lifts to the light. In a poem about light and electrons and the television screen, the smile lifting to the light takes on extra meaning. Then this meaning is revised by the next line: "light" turns out to refer to weight--light / syrup of Pet Sounds /...[and] Gil Gilberto. So, the meaning evolves in interesting ways, and the "wrong" meanings turn out to be right, part of the poem's unfolding strategy. Cool stuff. --Tony Barnstone



Third Place
sink holes and illusions
by Dorothy D. Mienko
Salty Dreams


he opened me
to a different way of dying

beautiful as ghosts

I wore him on my skin
for days

in my breath
I stored his stories
and his poems

we were eclipses -- an event
strange magnetic forces differences and fierce
chapters and colors

coral oceanic bubbles
clown paint


It seems that in this batch I am most attracted to elliptical, strange, lyrical poems that reference physics. Why is that? In any case, I am attracted to this poem. I'm not sure why ghosts are beautiful, or why the stories and poems are stored in the breath, or how we get from eclipses to magnetic forces to coral bubbles to clown paint, but I guess I enjoy the speed and surprise of the voyage, and I understand that all that I don't understand is erotic shorthand, short-circuiting of meaning, and so I don't try too hard to force it into the long circuit of the rational mind. --Tony Barnstone



Honorable Mentions


Snake Song
by Laurie Byro
Desert Moon Review


I was never intended to be unique.
Dawn appears as a shapeless cloud opening up
the path and I believe in the world beyond
my vision. Every dreamer is different.

Some seek sunlight, some seek shade, others sleep
in a starless night. In the witch grass a mate
slipped me out of my coal-grey suit. She cleaved
a blanket of ghost-skins. She belonged to me
and not the earth, and we dissolved from flame

to ash. Her truth is as flexible as her spine.
In high summer thousands tangle with the wind.
We are the wild braids on a mother's head.
We whistle our death tunes through the bones
of fallen sparrows. We feast on the banquet
of morning as the sun strikes the day like flint.

I am not the lowest of creatures and yet
I haven't been blessed with wings. I will not
entreat the trees to rustle their goodbyes
and cover me in leaves. I won't beg shivering
stars into harvesting wishes on me. My blood thickens
and sets. I shrink again into the crimson ground.



Zambezi Storm
by Beverleigh Gail Annegarn
Mosaic Musings


Violet clouds roll
like dragon's breath
over earth's contours.
In their wake, sharp raindrops
spike expectant ground.

Lightning spears pierce
and lash chaotically
silhouetting baobabs
clinging to shuddering rock.

Rain licks my face,
trickles into my eyes,
traps my clothing
on my shivering flesh.

Water shards, beamed by
pyrotechnics, scurry down
hills and banks. Gullies
gouge and chisel toward
the engorged river.

A night --
when elements
scrape together:
energies connect like war drums
on heaven's stage.

Daylight reveals
a cleansing...
animals dance,
pudgy plants perk and peek.

Sunshine kisses the wounded.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for October 2008
Judges Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald
Congratulations!

First Place

Ache
by Michael Creighton
The Waters


The year I turn 15, my father leaves me
with my just-widowed grandfather
and my first full-time summer job.
Each day in my lunch, I find fresh fruit

and a sandwich so fat it stretches
my jaw. Axe down, among rows
of old pine, I learn to love
the tang and bite of mustard on rye.

After work, I stay out with friends,
walking the town's mile-long
main street, drinking cold soda,
looking for girls.

If he's awake when I return
we discuss baseball,
the difference between jack pine
and white, or the pain

in my shoulders and neck.
He says, the Cubs haven't won a pennant
since your mother was three
but there's no harm in hope;

jack pine grows fast, but gives
poor wood--and as for that pain,
son, there is no cure for an ache like that,
save deep sleep and time.

Just once I come home early--
he is slumped in an old oak chair.
As he sleeps, his shoulders shake.
Dust hangs in sunlit air.


This was very close. It was almost a tie between first and second. We loved the rhythm of the poem, the story it told, and the conciseness of the writing. Its theme is both personal and universal. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Second Place

Convalescence
by Antonia Clark
The Waters


She lures him back by naming what he loves --
constellations, rivers -- repeating days and dates,
drawing the drapes to make an island.

One year, she let him keep her from catching
trains. In another, she gave up seasides, long ago
stored her silk kimono away on a high shelf.

A long whistle wails from the trestle
but there is no place here to stop.


We loved the poetry and atmosphere evoked. This poem beautifully tells a story and creates a whole world in few words. The last image of the wailing of the train is a haunting one. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Third Place
Debris
by Ashura
Pen Shells

Wong
has no name of favor, but is called
for convenience the way a hill
is climbed or a floor
swept. She will not revere
your gods or walk
the guidance of your hands
When you turn her head she will resist
your intensity, your compulsions
And when your fingers stir
debris from your pockets
her exit will be
impersonal

Somewhere
on the cusp of her breath
there is tremolo
She hands it with flowers and a plastic
bucket filled with medicines to
the men in saffron who drip water
on her temples
and chant

while you wait on
the steps with her
shoes

This poem has a wonderful flow to it. There is something mysterious and fetching about it. It keeps the reader engaged and curious. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Honorable Mentions


awake
James Lineberger
SaltyDreams


until i turned seventy
i could still do it one leg
crooked around
the upper rung of an a-ladder extension
leaning back easy arms free
to hold the drill with both hands
and fasten a new board
covering up
a raccoon hole on the fascia at the rear
of the house but then

then

there comes a time when you struggle
out of bed
to discover you can't accomplish
the familiar foolhardy
things you're so accustomed to
and not even
your wife will applaud you now when it is she herself
trying to remember to walk
the dogs
and your daughter coming over
to mow the lawn

and you learn
it's only in our dreams we have any
joy in this life
the nightmares lying awake
same as we

stretching their fucked-up knees to face the day



Compression
by Linda E. Cable
SplashHall Poetry


I was born somewhere between
tank parades, and blond step tables
adorned with oriental maidens
standing guard at picture windows.

The world turned hard and plastic
and the word was white.
It was lunch buckets, and fins at five o'clock,
gliding through cul-de-sacs.

Veterans scanned new laid sod for insurgents,
seeking rest on rayon sofas,
sustenance on TV tables,
quiet nights and just rewards.

One act plays were cast on patios,
blue collar boasts of Bradley and Patton,
housewives flouncing in skirts from Federals
to the tune of "Love Letters In The Sand."

We seemed so pretty then,
living advertisements for Amana,
True Grit and American Bandstand,
crayon copies of black and white movie stars.

I came of age somewhere between
The Mickey Mouse Club and Dallas,
in the year alabaster figurines shattered
with the sound of the first gun shot.


Imagination of the Deflated Balloon
by Henry Shifrin
Wild Poetry


The balloon lies marooned beside a stain
of a foot on an empty section of rug.

Smells of burned rubber where its tip
kissed a match. It had been so lonely
and the breeze, so gentle. The wind's

hand lifted gracefully toward the flame,
warm but too warm. The balloon leaves
the moment to dream: it fills with air,

rises into the clouds. Grounded fog
depresses all it covers, but moving
through clouds has a holy chill.

The balloon populates the sky
with round bodies, remembers
the static lightning two bodies

can rub into being -- the shock
that erases the space between them.
Realizes movement isn't as necessary

as thought, and so it inflates a friend
it knew when they clung to the same

lamp post, over the happy-birthday
sign and compared the size
of their shadows.

This balloon always darkened
the ground more than others.

At least it dreamed it that way.


Musée de la Résistance - Vaucluse
by Adam Elgar
Writer's Block


(Lavez les épluchures de pommes de terre, les jeter dans l'huile
bouillante. C'est aussi bien que les vraies frites.

Wartime advice on food economy, 1942 -- from a newspaper on display
in the museum)


In truth it nobly celebrates defeat,
confronts the shame by putting it on show,
tells later generations how deceit
seeps into victims' veins, makes sure we know

that victors try to put a price on air
and claim there never was a word for 'free'.
Starvation is the trump card. Pommes de terre:
prochaine distribution -- mardi.

It's all about the lies that people tell
to keep themselves afloat till truth comes back.
When brutal fact says il n'y a plus de lait

you have to come up with a counter-spell,
revive the rage that we complacent lack.
"Dissent. Resist." What else should freedom say?


Talk Like a Pirate Day*
by Catherine Rogers
Poets.org


Arr, I say. Arr. My darling
is unimpressed. He twists
his face in ways I can't
imagine and growls
AAAArrrrrrrrrrrgghh!
just like that. Scoundrel!
I love it when you talk
sea dog. The rest of the day
we go about calling each other
"Me hearty." At supper,
he calls for grog. I tell him he'll get
slop, and like it, or I'll have him
keelhauled. He orders me
to swab the decks. I tell him
that's the mate's job. We talk
about whether we want a cabin boy
or girl--it doesn't matter,
as long as it's healthy and strong
enough to do the swabbing.
All day we've imagined parrots
and dirks and doubloons.
On the other side of midnight,
the quotidian looms
like Her Majesty's man o' war.
Tomorrow, I'll be the one
with two earrings. He'll have none,
and dress in gray. No matter;
tonight we unbuckle our swashes
and heave to. We rock together
at anchor, dreaming of plunder,
free and ferocious, all night long.


*An international holiday observed annually on September 19

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for November 2008
Judges Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald
Congratulations!

First Place

Russian Crucifixes
by Emily Violet Swithins
The Writer's Block


Mama kept the Russian crucifixes
in the same drawer as her panties.
It gave her pleasure to think of the rough wood
rubbing up against silk.

She'd bury swan eggs to make flowers
more beautiful, and broken glass
to protect the garden from thieving foxes.
Dirt was magic; only city people called it filth.

She beat me with a cedar switch;
afterwards my wounds smelled holy.
When the black dust storms descended,
we hid in the underground shelter,

while papa read from the Old Testament.
I blamed myself for sneaking a peek at the crucifixes
and trying on mama's underwear, for kissing
the Jewish boy with my wicked tongue,

and hiding from papa at the bottom of the well.
The next morning we walked through the ruins,
and papa found the crucifixes, still neatly wrapped in silk.
He beat mama with his calloused fists.

Afterwards she filled the house with new
crucifixes, the cheap pine ones you buy in the dollar store.
The old ones she buried with the corpses of sunflowers.
I like to think of them that way, tangled in golden hair,
little priests in the arms of harlots.


Strong imagery and command of language, with a great rhythm and flow, make this piece stand out. It's full of contrast and surprises, and poetic lines, with a very strong end. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Second Place

My Father's Family Tree
by Anna Yin
Pen Shells


It all started from an ink spot,
my father took it as a sprouting bud.
Sucking on his smoking pipe,
he drew his long narrative
on a piece of paper.
I can sense his smile,
as leaves spread their dense fragrance:
always his favorite,
now highlighted by a brush -
son: a high-ranking officer,
daughter: a respectable scholar,
(my father decorated each with details
like my mother's Christmas tree)
then me, the would-be poet.
My father has never known poets,
and, to him, "would-be" worse than the rough bark.
(I can feel his pause)
then, a tinted soft orb beside me:
"engineer abroad" perfectly mirrored.
My father ensured his final touch
to free me from starving.
I roll up this glowing paper,
and place its warmth on my chest -
Someday at harvest,
out from the chrysalis of my heart,
I shall start a new scroll.


This poem also tells a great story, unique, yet universal. The piece is sure-handed, and captivates the reader from beginning to end. Both this poem and the first have a strong beginning and a strong end. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Third Place
only waitress at the truck stop who never uses the cash register
by Justin Hyde
Salty Dreams


pamela
is half indian,
grey-black hair
in a double braid
down her back.

every time
she serves me
another waitress
rings the ticket.

i figured
she was slow
or bad with numbers,
maybe had a
theft charge
in her past.

but yesterday
on my way out
she was sitting
on the
hood of her car
smoking a
cigarette.

come here a sec
tell me
what this says,
she motioned over
and handed me
a white piece of paper
creased in thirds.

told me
she found it
taped to her
apartment door
that morning.

i told her
it was a note
from her landlord
saying she had
five business days
to get rid of
her dog.

she stood up
and snuffed out
the cigarette
with her heel.

bear's been
with me
since idaho,
she said
and walked back in
leaving the note
in my hand.


This poem has a nice flow and interesting narrative. It's concise and compelling, and keeps the reader surprised until the end. The waitress is very well captured, almost cinematic. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Honorable Mention


An Endangered Species
by Melissa Resch
About Poetry Forum

Across the flats in Provincetown, Cape Cod
walking at sunrise in autumn
breathing in coolness of morning     low tide
like a bathtub draining empty
bubbles and crabs slinking
airborne gulls crying      loud and terse

This promising hour before coffee
prospectors laden with rakes and buckets
proceed over rocks and beach
ready to stake claim     a bit of sandbar as their own

Clammers are an endangered species
exteriors of calcified armor
too soft in the middle     just like
the clams they cherish and gather

Gashing at sand with tines of hard metal
eager for each clank of promise
fooled by broken shells     robbed of their innards
by one who came before

Buckets are filled inch by inch
heavy and ripe, lifted and lugged     the retreat begins
Briny ripples trickle in, cover and flood
this stretch of toiled, torn sand
chasing the diggers back to town     this wedge of land we call home
to study and share and shuck
bivalve bounty from an ocean garden

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for December 2008
Judges Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald
Congratulations!

First Place

Milk Noodle
by Greta Bolger
The Waters


Warmed whole milk with a pat
of butter the broth, skinny
noodles the substance.

Our favorite lunch, made by
a nearly blind grandfather
for shy Heidi and bold Greta.

He sat alongside us with old
coffee, a heel of bread and a
slice of salami, chewing softly.

I can still hear him humming
hymns as he washed up,
hear him calling us in from play.

Herein! Zeit, um zu essen!
Sie Kinder haben Hunger!
And it's true, we did hunger

for a father more sober than
his only son, for words we
could easily understand, for

foods we could easily digest,
milk noodle, oatmeal; for his
calloused hand smoothing our

silky blonde heads, warm
as the strange soup we slurped,
foreign, yet familiar as sun.


We liked the imagery of this poem, its simplicity and intimacy. The poet captured a vivid memory and successfully shared it with us, as if we were there. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Second Place

Aftermath
by S. Shademan
Poets.Org


Yesterday, my blue fingers
opened petal by petal.
I lost my grip on the trapeze.
My heart remained
white squeezed, buried
in the shirt drawer of a passed lover.

Today, the scent of wet leaves
pulled me out to the night's air.
I watched a silver coin
trapped in the black net of bare branches.
A smile started like a fountain
somewhere behind my eyes, trickled
down my cheeks, spread to my lips
engulfing my face.

Death, who has been calling me
for years, from that open space
between my ribs,
whose soft whispers I hear,
whose curled fingers I see
behind my eyes
luring me in, doesn't know

the day before I die
I will skip through the house
wearing my flannel pajamas
with my dangling gold earrings.

I will love every wrinkle:
on my father's cheeks
on my pregnancy plans
and those on my lover's shirt.


What makes this poem really interesting and stand out is its use of heightened language, especially the poignant last three stanzas. It reels you in with very poetic lines. It feels like a crescendo, each stanza a powerful beat, and has a very strong ending. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Third Place
Momento Mori
by Brenda Levy Tate
Pen Shells


Hold it to your ear and listen, my father said.
You'll hear the sea. He offered the conch
- one of a pair on the Florida souvenir counter -

and I lifted it against my never-cut curls.
The ocean spoke then (it must have been so,
for who would doubt the word of a navy man?).

Shoal-dance: hiss and boom and mutter.
We claimed both pink-throated ornaments,
set them beside our fireplace, where smoke

bit into their soft bosses. My father dusted
them often at first, then less and less.
He died on a May morning. I wasn't there.

Today I am in the family room, clearing my half-
life rubble, those trinkets never fully paid for.
My lost sailor rises from his water rest,

a bubble seeking light. Hold it to your ear,
he murmurs. I study the remaining shell,
pitted with ash acid, patterned with worm

burrows among its turrets. It looks starved.
I raise it to a lobe; my gold stud presses
where neck and jaw collide. Skull tectonics.

What sea still moves over these old reefs
and reaches? Just the eddy of my own
blood - personal undertow that sluices bone -

salt and iron doomed as any rotten vessel.
Heaven forgive my unbelief. I strain to resurrect
a single current here, flood and pull now silent

beneath a nacre sunset. Invented waves dry
in ruined chambers. My father retreats, a tide
ebbing through his deaf labyrinth. I cannot call

after him, nor even wring a prayer to wash
my aragonite dead.


This poem flows with a wonderful rhythm. Great use of language for a story that is both personal and universal. --Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Honorable Mention


Evening Prayer
by Emily Brink
The Writer's Block


For years I've tackled your mountain
hoping to find some bristle of truth.
A crevice warm as a puppy's slick tongue.
Your peak promises glory; delivers injury.
I've subsisted too long on your snowmelt
and yak butter diet. I have woven
a coat from the strands of your hatred
and the seams of your wit.
Down in the village they've declared
clocks useless and started evening prayer.
Tibetan flags flutter in the wind
like paper lamps in Santa Fe or quilts
hanging on lines in a Midwestern town:
it's like being everywhere at once
until the prayers are done,
candles snuffed. I'm just a bird
changing direction, alone in mid-air.