IBPC Winning Poems, 2010, Congratulations Poets! Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

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

First Place
Eureka Springs
by Jude Goodwin
The Waters


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


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



Second Place
Snow
by Judy Swann
The Waters


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

Life holds still, like a painting or a mountain.


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



Third Place
Tiger, Tiger
by Mitchell Geller
Desert Moon Review


(With profound apologies to William Blake)

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

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

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

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

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

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


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




Honorable Mentions

Wig
by Michael Harty
Wild Poetry Forum


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

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


Takazumi
by Bren Lyons
criticalpoet.org


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


Post Apocalypse in Polo Park
by Don Schaeffer
Pen Shells


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

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

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

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

[Cleo_Serapis]

Winning Poems for December, 2010
Judge Paul Lisicky
Congratulations!

First Place
Giant Cockroaches
by Mignon Ledgard
The Writers Block


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You wake
and forget each night’s fear—

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


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



Second Place
A New Cartography
by Mandy Pannett
The Write Idea


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



Third Place
Run
by Cynthia Neely
Desert Moon Review


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

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

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

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


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