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 Winning Poems from 2001 January • February • March
January 2001 First Place A man sits down to a table and explodes. Bits of him float from the ceiling covering his family like feathers, spicing their food. In Haitian there are 27 words for fire and none for snow. The undead walk through coals and leave no footprints. They work the cane harvest without pay. It's difficult to tell who is who in the fields. I put sugar in my coffee and wait for my heart to race, ready to confess my sins to no one. An empty house has no ears. I write fire on paper 27 times and feel the heat. My scalp snows my shoulders. I have wasted my life. How many times have I attempted to leave? I sit in my car, listen to Blues For Pablo hissing somewhere almost beyond the radio's reach. Once I got as far as New Orleans where a loony nag on Magazine Street told me my eyes were not right then asked for a dollar. I had two. Three times I think. The rest of the time, I drift like feathers from the ceiling. I love a woman I do not know. I write snow, it turns to fire. I know a woman I do not love. Footprints and shadows. These are my sins. This is no tale familiar. This is not the story of my life. A poet sits at the table and explodes. There is no family to notice. Or not notice. The room slowly fills with silence. With this. Second Place It's the tone of the phone. It's the tune of the moon. It's the fate of date. It's the heat of the beat. It's the drive of the sweet night alive. It's the mode of the road. It's the feel of the wheel. It's the scope of the hope. It's the bliss of the kiss. It's the drive of the sweet night alive. It's the wail of the gale. It's the snap of the rap. It's the cant of the chant. It's the flash of the Nash. It's the drive of the sweet night alive. It's the flirt of the skirt. It's the tease of the squeeze. It's the view of the blue. It's the swell of the bell. It's the drive of the sweet night alive. It's the glide of the ride. It's the slick of the stick. It's the start of the heart. It's the sound of the pound. It's the drive of the sweet night alive. It's the thrill of the spill. It's the rush of the blush. It's the sigh of the high. It's the drug of the hug. It's the drive of the sweet night alive. It's the drive of the sweet night alive. It's the drive of the sweet night . . . alive. Third Place I'm living out your legend on my tongue (This is the holy land we're wandering in), With you tasting like the words that come to me, This tongue tracking down your softest wheres, These words tickling my throat. But in your flesh I know what worship is, this tongue directly To the salt skin and fathoms of yourself (Not under water, in a new salt air), Word complexioned, and as a long earth quake In which the universe of you is laughing me To go down and down to make up all the words That will never equal you, wave and matter As the story in the language of our dream Together: Goddesses and Gods of sweat, Of breasts and hands and lips that only speak When there's nothing left to say but "Linger" In the dark place where your thighs are met By what of me is light enough to find you. Honorable Mention I spoke with your mother again. She said she's having fun, but She misses you, and your dad. She knows he found someone new, Like she always knew he would. She said it doesn't hurt as bad As she thought it would. And doesn't blame him. Even old men live for sex, she said. I asked about the weather. Fine, she said, calm and mild- Comfortable. Little change. Not much new, she said. Death's just another place To fill with time, And there's no view, she said, And there's no wine. I think she started to cry When I told her I had to go. She said to send her love to you, And that she'd see me soon. Honorable Mention Looking back I can't for the life of me imagine myself married to him. Yet there they are, thirty-six thirty-nine, forty-one his children. My children. His lips, my hands, his slow glance my smart-ass observations. Our creations to remind us we once loved not only each other but every moment of those first years until the day we woke up startled blank, and slowly walked toward different oceans. Sharing little anymore but the people we made in another season when we were so sure we knew who we must have been. Honorable Mention "Blackbird singing in the dead of night Take these broken wings and learn to fly All your life You were only waiting for this moment to arise." Paul McCartney & John Lennon - "Blackbird" In the dream, she sits at a white table. She sits in her seat. She knows it's her seat. The others have not yet arrived. The table is set for three. There are paper plates, white plastic silverware. In the center of the table white lilacs wait. Shasta daisies, one red peony, its heavy head tips toward her. She understands this invitation. She wants to touch the soft red petals. How desirous she is of its fragrance. She reaches, plucks a petal, brings it slowly to her lips. Feels the fragile softness of its skin, pinches its flesh. Breathes its bruised aroma. She places it on her tongue, red communion. Savors its taste. She snatches more, shoves them into her mouth, devours tender petals. Thick blood pours from her lips, down her throat, drenches the table. The plates fill. Blood pools into the white bowl of her spoon. Horrified, her hands tremble, flutter at her open mouth - nervous white doves. Her lungs fill with a scream. She turns, runs to the open window, flings herself into white summer. She slams onto sweet garden sod. She jerks, shimmies. She cups the sky in her eyes, comes to rest at last. In her hand, blows the breeze. Over her head, lilacs and daisies move into new day. She knows inside, the others have arrived. The chairs scrape. They eat their fill. The peonies provide. Honorable Mention Joey ate ants every day, a disorder he developed when his mother ran off sometime in his fourth year. Joey picked up ants with two fingers, looked at them first, then looking straight ahead, thoughtlessly put them into his mouth. He always chose the black, quiet, slow-moving ones, maybe because they were quiet and slow like him. One day, Joey's mother returned and took Joey o\ut to dinner. They were sitting quietly at the table, and when she finally said, "I've missed you!" a black sea of ants began crawling out of Joey's mouth drowning the space between them. Honorable Mention For two years she's been here, smiling at me (a disenchanted daughter) -- and still, she ends up with salt water sighs and helpless condolences just like mine. She's got that rock bottom look and I don't know how to tell her that she'll wrestle wishbones and bargain with nose-diving needles that never sleep. Together, we sit on the fatherless side of the room, whispering about identity while waiting for one of those palisade moments to chase away the obvious with good news. I know the difference between spilling sadness and standing in it, but I've had two years to dissect that sentence -- she'll offer an olive branch when reveries and resentment lapse into reality. Maybe someday she'll ask me if anniversaries chip away at limits or slice into sensible tempos, and I'll try not to swallow the truth. Honorable Mention December is crumbling under the wandering eye of a scurrilous sun, like dirty snowflakes we digress into the mundane: You with those emotions that get in the way of that and this and I mumbling condolences for the way things often go as we spit-trip on colloquialism while the world revolves on its complacency with six billion passengers pondering the Rorschachian legend on a crease-strewn map gone through too many fingers, passed among too many hands -- We are as molecules humping in the night, replete in our randomness, chaotic in our endeavor, as particular as the drivel on the lips of a feral god trying to wipe us clean with the back of its hairy hand -- And we are back to you and I with this and that as randomness goes stiff like the rods and cones in my wandering eyes. As always, I will try not to notice the spittle on your too full lips and what goes on there as December crumbles and six billion molecules find their libidos in the dark. Honorable Mention This is all I know of you: that you are alone in the fall of evening, and the light has come far to touch you, that there are numbers circled at your wrist, and you are waiting, and the day yawns, and the day lengthens in the stretch of your shadow. This is what you know of me: that one sock is blue and one sock is black, and the page tabled at my knee has bled stains into the furrows of my thumb, that the pen at my mouth is bitten and stuttered, and I am waiting, and the words tangle, and the words amble, and the words are crossed through. We are a poem now, you and I (and perhaps not this one, but another when I am wiser); and a symbol; a strophe for each of us, and one we share together. Were you to sing beneath your breath there would be ghosts to wander the timbre of your voice. Best you just go, for we are strange to one another, and lost, and the dusk has settled, and now the dark. You may rise like night and sudden fog; you may leave me in the whispers of your limbs, for I can no longer see the words and there is nothing left to write. Honorable Mention ..."without lights or music, even the ghost of ourselves had to break up the party... -Billy Collins I lie in bed reading, and you turn, steal my right arm, curl around it as if to keep me captive. My left hand now holds the book without free fingers to turn its pages. And my eyes skip about the poem to where, after the storm, the blackout, and everyone has gone to bed, the lights come back on and the partygoers' ghosts continue without them. I wonder what my ghost are doing this morning: mowing the lawn's ankle-deep grass? washing dishes from last night's tuna casserole? or pulling our urine-soaked daughter from her crib? I put the book down, unable to turn its page. You steal the other arm and my ghosts continue without me. Honorable Mention She was kneeling, her small white feet tucked tenderly 'neath her thighs. Her hands, summer-blasted, grabbed up the ground, green blades poking 'tween those crazy fingers. Then she lay it down again slow slowly, in soft green heaps -- like a fragile corpse -- to rest. I watched her on a nearby bench, through a swirl of smoke. Smiling at my own crazy fingers, clutching my own grass. Honorable Mention I trace the seams with my fingers, heft the balanced weight in my palm, smell the leather; scoop an imaginary one-bouncer like Rico Petrocelli, fire a rope to "Boomer" at first base. My father chuckles, I don't understand his amusement. He tosses me my glove and picks up a Louisville Slugger, nods me to short stop The first time Katie fell on the ice I told her to get up. She couldn't understand how I'd submit her to such humiliation: "Get up, get up, everybody falls while they're learning, get up!" A peaceful breath of insomnia wakes me at 4am, the moon settles into the palms. From the birch stand, a granite outcrop is the immutable centerpiece as the green lawn rolls until swallowed by a dense skirt of oak and pine. The squirrels are braver this year. Rocky and Buck are gone. Kody's so slow He's content chasing down his stuffed squirrel: much easier to catch. Another wrinkle in your smile. a touch more silver in your hair- you look wonderful. . . Flowers are important. Your garden is lush. You take time to add water. One more wedding or funeral. The family gathers, raked in like scattered leaves, pick up conversations where they last ended, without pause. Grandchildren giggle, clutch fingers, their bellies shake with laughter. Pictures line the mantel, four generations in black and white. The clock ticks. Angels sing and glasses hoist in toast, " to the newlyweds", six ushers lead him in; "he was a fine man", and six bearers carry him out. An olive rolls across the table, bouncing- plops motionless onto the floor. Someone stands, his hand raised like a conductor's, points his wand at you, commands your melody. . . "I'm Sammy Sosa!" "Then I'm Mark McGuire!" Red dust settles over second base. A foul tip rolls to a stop between my feet. I pick up the grass-stained, frayed-seamed ball, lob it back to the anxious pitcher. Honorable Mention I pull to loosen and remove the thin, black bow knotted above the hollow of her neck as she goes on about the structure of relationships based on service; class delineations really piss her off, she rails. If I fail to follow, am more consumed by her fertile than febrile cloud, by the acrid fog of a woman who works, hard, she little notices, absorbed in the intricacies of undressing. Beneath a narrow poplin fold running the length of lapels in her shirtwaist, the buttons of a tuxedo blouse are small and hard white as ivory' squared, they must be pinched and pushed through the holes. A lover of rhetoric in stockinged feet: "Are the oranges atop the heap more desirable, or are they simply more desirable atop the heap?" she polls and rolls flesh tones down as her mother taught. Conscious now only of the elation in proximity, in formal, ritual procedure, with reverence, in ardor, I defer opinion, nearly drunken with lifting her black, frail, pleated, crepe skirt. Honorable Mention Haunting Windswept beauty Timeless eternal place Keening screaming seabird spiral Climbing Final Bare resting place A thousand thousand souls Keening screaming seabird spiral Calling Timeless Eternal place Surf scoured tainted beauty Keening screaming seabird spiral Haunting Honorable Mention Buy me a beer, light my cigarette, tell me nice girls like me shouldn't; slide your thigh against mine, stare at my tits, tell me I look like Courtney Love when she was a heroin addict. Tell me I smile fierce, that you like how I suck on my cig; refer often to your ex, the bitch, and the pending divorce. Tell me about hunting, how you blew a shot on a doe, severed her spinal cord and watched her crawl through the snow making sounds you'd never heard a deer make before while her fawn followed the blood trail mewling. Smile a lot, show off your tattoos, pull up your shirt so I can see snakes writhe in skulls, the grim reaper grin under his hood, and a jack-in-the-box sprung, leering like satan. Tell me your Harley's out back, invite me for a ride, tell me you don't wear a helmet, that you've only got 2 DUI's; tell me riding a motorcycle's better than sex, legs wrapped around the engine, flying over pavement at 95 mph. Stand up, ask: you coming or not; don't smirk when I toss back my beer, kill my cigarette, lipstick my lips and say yes. Honorable Mention Walking with shortened steps he carries his bones with care, fingers flexing air; his lips a rictus of concentration. A fossil gripping fists of rain, sounding off his aches and pains he counts cadence; marches to his last bastion, "The Legion" and his regimental bottle of ale. In control, he sips through palsied lips, then eases to his feet, fortified for the trip back home. An old soldier trying to sustain home rule, he goes AWOL each afternoon, as nurses turn their backs in silent salute. Honorable Mention Each dawn before the sun devoured the shade and seared the arid land, a potter strode down to the well along a dusty road to fill a well-used water jar he'd made. As he returned one day a stranger said, "Your jar is fractured. Anyone can see you waste your time, and labour fruitlessly. The water spills along the track you tread." The potter answered, "Though it leaks, it still provides enough for me, and I would not, for all its flaws, discard my battered pot. It has a special purpose to fulfil." Where he had passed, a radiant display of flowers rose to greet the breaking day.
February 2001 First Place Rev.11:1,2 Israel takes back the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, rebuilds the temple, reinstitutes traditional sacrifice. Outside Mehola Cafe there are torrents. He watches those inside eat, drags hard on a cigarette. Tossing the butt to the ground, he opens the door, wears the night rain like a jacket. He moves toward a crowded table, shouting "All praise to Allah!" His voice stuns, booming over thunder, he tugs at his belt and explodes. Limbs and shards race to hit the wall. Three Israelis dead. Rev. 9:5, 15 13 months of preparation coincides with Ramadan, 8 months before Invasion. Salama al-Sawarka is content. His plants grow well, his greenhouse lush and moist and warm with the sun's rays -- all praise is due Allah as the orbit turns, leads this Ummah to the gates of His mercy, to the key of the mysteries of His nearness. Salama fasts, reads Al-Qur`an, converses directly with the Creator of the Universe as the bullet smashes the glass, enters his head, meant for a nearby military post. Rev. 9:15-18 200 million men and armor invade Israel. Jersualem is taken. Zion/New Jerusalem is founded, exists for 1260 days. David's city, sweet Mother of our dreams, center of our prayers, focus of our struggle, you are the heart of my people. I cannot give away my heart -- The Temple Mount is Ours. Mother slumps over the steering wheel of her car, her white blouse bloodied. Baby is still strapped in car seat, no longer smiling. On a February day, Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem riding on a white camel. He was dressed in worn, filthy robes. The army that followed him was rough and unkempt, but its discipline perfect as his posture as he rode straight to the Temple Solomon where Mahomet ascended to heaven... 100 thousand lights flicker atop torches under the walls of the Old City. There are signs in Jerusalem, see them borne by Settlers who chant and march while running to avoid the rocks that clatter and echo on cobblestone. Rev. 11:7-10 Two prophets are dead for 3.5 days. They ascend to heaven. Coincidentally, there is a great earthquake, earth activity. Stone-throwing clashes near Nablus. Two Palestinians shot dead. O al-Haram al-Sharif, holiest of holy, al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques, I perform prayer-prostrations in the assembly of my predecessors in the prophetic office of Abraham, Moses, Jesus. I pray for peace. Meetings between field commanders, coordination and updates, trilateral security talks fail to staunch bloodshed. The Envoys go home, Palestinians may not return. Luke 21:27 Blessed is he on the 1335th day. The earth moves to reunite its continents. Time is no longer. The sun never sets the moon never withdraws there is a new heaven and earth with no sea. It is finished. There is peace. Second Place Gracie laughs in my '68 Impala, Reo Red fender skirts, and a Wonder Bar plays tunes as I marvel at the sound, switching the radio off to hear her laugh again. It started like a whisper, like a lover's first touch. She felt tired all the time, smiled less, it was just a tickle, a cough. Later, the wheezing, gasping for breath as a swimmer who'd barely made it to shore. We arrive, park facing the ocean and unpack, the beach empty, ours. Tossing picnic crumbs to a sky fluttering with gulls, we dig our toes in the velvet sand, sun-soaked silhouettes walking on waves. SCLC, doc said -- errant cells multiply, invade all parts of the body. Survival rate? It varies. His face frozen. Professional. Cold. Couldn't be more than 25, this kid telling me Gracie would die. I wanted to punch him. Gracie just stared at the floor. We watch the twilight wane, holding hands. Honey red fades to pink, then purple plum. We kiss as we watch the sun slip away, taste the salty spray that coats our lips and skin. The Treatment was aggressive, no choice so late in the game. Chemotherapy. Radiotherapy. Diarrhea, nausea, vomiting. Day and night I held her head and hand while she filled the bowl. The night breeze is cool, sends skin tingles. I lower her gently to the sand, still warm from the afternoon sun. I touch her hair, undress her like a small child while the surf coaxes us on. The first few months after treatments started she'd brush her hair, long and fine and blond, it pulled from her scalp in handfuls. She'd laugh, said she'd sell it then wept as she tried on her first wig-- looked in the mirror ripped it off threw it to the floor screaming and boogeying on it. There is no moon tonight, the sky cloudless. Gracie takes my hand, rises slowly. I brush the sand from her body, dress her again, watch her wince as I do. She'd try to button her robe, fingers trembling and fumbling, groaning with frustration and pain. If I tried to help, she'd glare and back away, say "I hate that look in your eyes." I want to speak, tell her . . .she shusses, touches my lips with fingertips to silence me and turns to face the sea, walks away toward the car. More hospitals. And pain. Excruciating pain, her brow furrowed as she rode the never ending waves, dark circles marked her suffering, her lack of sleep and her questions "When am I going to die?" "Where am I going to die?" Slipping into the driver's seat, she waits. The trunk opens, shuts. I connect one end of the hose to the exhaust, snake the other through a window and roll it up tight, no cracks. Gas tank full, engine on the Wonder Bar plays a muted song. I hear Gracie's laugh again, drifting away as I begin the long walk home. Third Place My neighbours had an ancient cat -- Aged twenty years, at least -- And though they coaxed her every day, This independent beast Would never step inside their door -- No house-cat shame had she -- But took her meals upon their porch; A true-born cat, and free. From whence she came, no man can tell; Her genesis -- mystique. The neighbours found her as a youth, Sun-warmed and sound asleep; Upon their father's grave she'd lain (Sweet hour of paws repose) And brought her home to Hamlen St.-- For luck, I would suppose. They called her "Sniff" and learned to live According to her ways, And more than once they shook their heads And thought they'd rue the day; For what's the use to keep a cat Who'd never come inside? But, she was independent And they'd have to abide. And, in her prime, she was a lion To four-foot, beak and wing. She stalked and pounced and thrilled to life -- Just listen to her sing! And though she'd never step inside Their lowly, human house, In all the time she graced their lives They never saw a mouse. Through years of hunts and dawn patrols And footpad-silent nights, Of sunny porch and shady bow'r That were a cat's delight, She held her own and made her way -- Her cat-soul ne'er was bought -- For, she was independent, Just in case you had forgot! Now, cats are territorial And this one, true to form, Patrolled the borders of her world In weathers cold or warm. Across the street, my auntie lived -- My aunt, who had no cat -- So Sniff decided to make sure She'd never see a rat! Two houses, then, became her ward -- She'd rest beneath the porch. Whenever strangers ventured near, Her protest she'd send forth. And, oh, the noise that cat could make, Her challenge roaring out! She'd keep my aunt's integrity -- Of that, there was no doubt. And thus the seamless years slid by 'Til I, at length, came home To care for Auntie -- in decline; Too soon, I was alone. But, no, not quite, for every time I stepped upon the walk, The guardian beneath the porch Let out her fearsome squawk. I'd smile and shake my head and say, "Go on -- I live here, now." And Sniff would sniff, as if to say, "Behave yourself, or, POW!" I never yelled or chased her off, Though pride, betimes, was stung; For years she'd faithfully kept guard -- She'd earned the weight she swung. And Sniff was getting on in age -- Her years were plain to see; Her coat was thick and matted, And she'd slowed, to some degree. More often now, upon the porch, She'd stretch out in the sun And soak the heat up as she slept -- We seldom saw her run. A year ago this spring, things changed -- At first, I was perplexed; For she'd appear upon my porch And howl in tones quite vexed. 'Til fin'ly I took the hint And set a dish outside; Then Sniff would breakfast, quite content, While I went back inside. A week of this, and I called Deb To see if she'd declined To feed the old cat anymore, But, no, Sniff, double-dined! Within a month she went no more To Deb, across the street; It seemed that now my porch was where Sniff chose to take her meat. We laughed about it, Deb and I, And 'cause I'm life-long poor, Deb bought the cat food I'd serve up When Sniff came to my door. And through the summer days it went, And still, when autumn came, I served this ragged, scruffy cat That never had been tamed. And 'twas no easy service, for When Sniff, to need, gave voice, Her strident call could shake the walls -- Refusal was no choice, And in a while it dawned on me -- The reason she was loud -- That years of ear-mite damage Had reduced this cat, once proud. If Sniff was looking at you And she saw her dish in hand, She'd hasten to receive it, And she'd think it mighty grand. But if you were behind her And she didn't see her host, She wouldn't know you answered -- She was near-deaf as a post. 'N' we'd often see her stagger, If she took a sudden step, For her balance, too, was shattered By the gunk down in the depths. I'd have to stomp upon the boards -- She'd feel me shake the porch; Then, blithely, she would turn around To see what I'd brought forth. When winter came, with bitter winds, For once she seemed inclined To show some int'rest in the hall That, from me, stretched behind. And I thought, if she'd just come in, To take her bit of sup, At least while she was eating, Just for then, she could warm up. I held the door and showed the dish And coaxed her to come in, But she demurred and would not step Inside my human den. But when I propped the door ajar And left her to her pride -- Before I'd reached the kitchen, that Old cat had come inside. And sometime after Christmas (This had gone on, now, for weeks) More often she would snooze a while Before the door she'd seek. And soon it wasn't she who'd howl -- There wasn't any doubt; She seldom asked to be set free, 'Twas me who'd put her out. Then, all at once, the light came on, As daybreak lights the dawn, 'N' the insight came that clued me in To what was going on. And I recalled a story that, I think, O. Henry penned About an aging hired hand And how he'd met his end. The details, I could not recall; The point was graven deep and, long a-slumber in my soul, Awakened from its sleep. I knew, deep down, that it was thus Between this cat and I -- This life-long independent Had come home to me, to die. This scruffy lump of matted fur With cloudy, rheumy eye, This aging unrepentant who Had never come inside, This poor infested, wretched scrap Who'd seen and done it all Had come to me for refuge And the hospice of my hall. Was ever there such compliment (Though few would recognize), Such gift of trust and confidence As shone in this one's eyes? The trusting quest for simple acts That cannot be repaid; A load to bear -- because you're there -- With nothing gained in trade? Of course, you know the cat moved in; Her bowls sat in the hall. She slept in an old reed basket With a blanket to cover all. And though she'd never been so trained, My doubts, aside, were torn, For she took to the kitty-litter box As if to the Manor born. Through winter's term she seldom left Except on sunny days, When she would lay her weary bones To soak up winter rays. By then, she'd let me pet her, though 'Twas only on her head; The mat she wore was stiff and hard -- 'Twas less alive than dead. And, Lord, she was the sweetest thing You'd ever want to know; And once she gave her heart away, She quickly let me know -- She'd purr and tried to rub my legs, Though often she would lurch, For when she'd brush against her ears, 'Twas plain it really hurt. So, me, I got the neighbour girl To come and help me out. She held the cat -- at full arm's-length -- I worked back from her snout, And clipped and snipped and did my best To clear a petting path. (I hoped, if I could get her shorn, One day we'd try a bath!) The day I cleared her, stem to stern -- Three inches wide, the back -- I feared for my composure, for It very nearly cracked. I drew my hand from nose to tail O'er fragile, parchment skin That long had missed the air and light Her mat had not let in. At first, she jumped; then, with a sigh (I swear I heard it so!) She arched her back and purred and purred, And would not let me go. It had been years since she had Truly felt the least caress. She fell asleep upon my lap, And I knew that I'd been Blessed. This spring I took her to the vet's And, yes, it cost me dear; But at night I'd hear her crying For her mite-infested ears. And lately she had suffered much -- A tooth had been abscessed -- And how she'd ever fought it off, Well, only God could guess. She took it well and soon forgave Those gross indignities, But I knew, by then, that time was short -- 'Twas but a brief reprieve. With summer soon, and warmer days, She took to going out; And in, and out, and in again -- She darn near wore me out! I confess that I turned stubborn, When the day's last light would fall; Then I took my turn at being "deaf" And didn't hear her call. For the streets about turned busy, and She was so deaf and slow, To die in pain and fear and shock, 'Twould be too cruel a blow. Then June arrived, and balmy nights Brought scented memories; And Sniff so wanted to go out Upon Midsummer's Eve. The moon was full, her heart was gay -- 'Twas purr-fect for a stroll; I scratched her back and petted her And then, I let her go. My mind's eye sees her sniff the air That fluffs her new-grown fur, And walks with her along the track Where feathers fly and fur, Like downy puffs, explodes in fright -- I hear the squeak arrest. Then, to a well-belov'ed den Where, paws tucked to her chest, She snuggles in some cozy lair Where she had passed her years -- A little nap, to catch her breath, In calm repose from fears. And, dreaming, hear as every branch Pours bird-song on the sward; And somewhere down the Paw-Twitch path She passed to her reward. I know there's those who'll think that I'm A sucker for all that; That, 'twas a sin I was beguiled By an old and dirty cat. For she was unrepentant And she never stooped to please, But I can't begrudge that weary dam Those last few months of ease. Look, poverty's an awful thing, When riches we don't merit, But it seems to me the worst would be That poverty of spirit That makes us choose to turn away In someone's hour of need. Don't all those rules just make us fools, When we've no charity? For know that, someday, you and I Will wish a gentler penance; For a scrap of rug and a warming mug We'll trade our independence. And hope that life will give us leave To come in from the weather And grant us each that bit of ease, Before we're gone forever. Third Place Stories spill from this woman, pool in the crevices of her hands. A spoon clanks in continuum as her fingers orbit a restaurant mug , her nails, stained moons. History caped in gray, sits with me sipping tea. In quiet words of thees, thous and thines she speaks of First Day Schools, knitting blue mittens for Jewish orphans and refugees from two centuries who whispered in her attic. She rocks Africa's lost babies, shares stews stirred on indian fires, writes letters to her children from straw-lined prison cells and murmurs meditations from orange-gold savannas. Beaten, bleeding, praying she sings from the splintered umbrage of the gallows. Books she's read and written flutter from her tongue (They feel like bricks in my hands). She speaks scriptures unaware. I take notes with a borrowed pen, in hopes it will all rhyme later. Dedicated to those women who carry on the ministry Margaret Fell set forth, allowing her to "live on" in spirit. Honorable Mention I've never seen a face darken. Blush, pale perhaps. In this story it happens. Burdock and Yarrow choke broken tracks, a wonder that trains still chug this line. Late night ghost whistles haunt the most peaceful surrender. I wonder where, who, why? I have always sought the mysterious. Early days I spied, every stranger suspect, conspirator. Secret words, handshakes, looks easy to detect. Women who patted my head and smiled wound up back in my bed beneath puppy dog flannel. My heart grew cold. Teen years saw the birth of the avenger, part Spade, part Marlowe, part comic hero. I scoffed at any pleasantry and kept a profile lower than other fools my age. Rolled cigarettes, second hand jackets, fingers of whiskey. I gumshoed my way to now. Brown Sedge tickles my ankles. Mother-Of-Thousands. I put my ear to the track and wait. The story will end one way or another. Losing the light, my face darkens. Honorable Mention Feet on cold dull stone harness like an old bathrobe wonder more than the waking, rising more than I can bear how did I come here- salt crystals like tree vines knowledge binds, a shroud redeem me The waking and sea taste more than the salt weight of it uneased by stretch or flex where thin weals rise, salt lines rub starched gloves on numb hands one glance and now it coils around, cracked at knees and elbows redeem me I make coffee in a chenille kettle anger more than hot steam rising look back, wonder that I came here that I slice oranges with sharp murder peel my life away a waking, my salt dough like some coiling snake, cut off its flat brown head and toast it, from the salt char, ashes ashes all gone away redeem me More than the waking I would undo the one glance back, leave my salt blood and broken teeth behind ragged dreams caught on thin screams beat the corners with stiff brooms to cage them, just one look back to see redeem me Honorable Mention He pummels her with brushstrokes, coaxes bruises to the surface that splay like O'Keefe's irises--so grotesque he can't look away and he can't look at them. She crawls toward Wyeth's horizon, trapped in Christina's body, yearning for the house on the hill that looms like a headstone. He breaks her with artless precision, folds her into smaller and smaller pieces like an origami crane; elbows jut from her body like flightless wings. He splatters blood on the linoleum with Pollack's careless intention, pleased by the random design the hemorrhage creates. Her mouth gapes in Munch's silent howl; he hammers her skull to add gray matter and bone, flecks of texture, to his composition. His masterpiece is done. She's finished. Honorable Mention Gerald of course, was to blame for all of this. Late night torchlight forays in Crete led innocently to a meeting with a man he had been whispering with all along. Everything, they said, was just so. I had a pressed cardboard satchel and always grubby ankle socks, but that was to be expected when every evening whispered Africa and we had been emptying calabashes of palm wine and conga-ing in the Congo with the Fon of Bafut all night. They sat me away from the windows at school. I drew ring-tailed lemurs in algebra books and wondered if Miss Pritchard ever got the urge to go collecting in the Cameroons. Geography was all industrial hinterlands and demographics, Germany never really caught my imagination. I filtered rain from jungle canopies through my fingers, ran barefoot with cheetahs in the vast orange bowl of the Serengeti. I remember riding a bony Arabian somewhere near Aswan, in one hundred and thirty degree heat, struggling with swatches of remembered French, squinting my eyes to catch the sails of silent feluccas gliding the Nile. I remember Morocco. I am saving the jungles for later, but not so late that I am too old to dance naked but befeathered in the snake shadows of tribal fires. And I will know that cane-rats make good eating, that salt kills leeches, that bushbabies will stare moonily through tangle-dark llianas, and smile. Honorable Mention Once your tongue has fingered The wet gossamer of woman You made her your next work The Guernica you sold the world You had found in a woman Who came seeking the war In your smoldering eyes You wolfed them, milked Drops of their evil into your palette. Every time a virtue tempted You sold an Apollinaire Artful matador that you are You died a monkey on a window Seeing once glowing skin turn loose tarpaulin Over flaccid muscles, twig bones Under the gaze of the whore You hired for that elusive hard-on Picasso, the Faustus who won Is framed in formalin In the portrait of Dora Maar.
March 2001 First Place red dirt or yellow clay did not clog our lives or ruin the wash in ‘49 our world was colored gray and stained brown from granite gravel and Cascade mud 3000 miles from the red hills of Georgia too few years gone by too many blowouts ‘long the way for Grandpa to quit fighting long-dead feuds with cheap whiskey and bad beer too few curves and passes too many cold nights and hot days hoeing beans for Grandma to accept his fight was real as her 16 babies and not an old drunk’s raves In our town in 1949, there were no what we now lump together as minorities. No coloreds, Indians, or Mexicans. No one with a name that ended in vowels or started with Gold. There were Catholics, but mostly they were German. Smedley’s Pass was white folk on the road to nowhere and not in any hurry to get there. Farmers and loggers and a few veterans trying to forget the war. in ‘49 they sent Dot to the sanitarium Buddy drowned in Willow Lake Carl lost his arm in a mill accident Henry screamed in his sleep about killing Japs Alice lost a boy-baby Frank packed up his family and moved to San Diego Grandpa swore at Grandma for not getting the red and yellow mud cleaned off his boots that he couldn’t take Livie to the dance looking like no hick hill farmer mud on his boots Grandma prayed for the crazy old man to die prayed for the Lord God Jesus to forgive her for those evil thoughts for sins past and yet to come in ‘49 I was seven years old and lived with my grandparents. Within a half day’s walk lived three uncles, two aunts, and several grown cousins. I spent a fair amount of time hiking to their houses and sleeping under the stars, listening to coyotes and hoot owls. Henry, unmarried, lived with us. Dorothy had been until she got the TB. white trash not quite there were too many war heroes dairy farmers and logging truck drivers in the family to be considered white trash and by marriage a bookkeeper a forest ranger the owner of the Smedley’s Pass Cafe and the best auto mechanic in town and we weren’t okies or arkies just Georgia clay which had birthed Cascade mud for sixty-odd years but we were close In 1949, I found out how close. Sundays, the women and a few of the older men went to church, babies and the girl-children in tow. Us boys would have to go unless we could find an excuse, like helping Uncle Willie with haying or Aunt Hilda’s husband fix his bulldozer. This Sunday, I had to help Grandpa and Henry find the Jersey milker, who had wandered into the woods to calf. the west woods nettles and thistle blackberry and blackcap at the edges hemlock oregon grape scrub alder and hazelnut inside (Grandpa carried a flask Henry the shotgun in case bears caught the Jersey’s scent I’d snuck a few cookies from the cupboard) brambles from one end to the other where giant fir once towered by the creek skunk cabbage salmonberry devils club (she would head to the water always did I, small enough to get under the brush would be the first to find her always was) to my left Grandpa and Henry sought an easier path followed a deer trail to the creek to my left I heard them arguing (I could see Grandpa pulling on the flask could see Henry’s grip tighten could hear. . .) In 1949, towns as small as Smedley’s Pass were as stratified as any Hindu city. Families as large as ours were even more so. Mabel, married to the Cafe and Paula to the bookkeeper, thought they were better than Sally with her father’s disease or Olive married to a gypsy logger. Unwed mothers and bastard children at the bottom of the family heap. you shiftless sum-bitch milkin’ battle fatigue stress my ass you’re just a lazy bastard old man shut your filthy mouth you don’t be calling me no bastard you don’t be talking that way about mama you don’t know nothing you stupid kid you think I don’t know the bitch was humping with my brother why do you think I waited for him on the jacksonville road and why do you think he’s buried in red and yellow clay ‘stead of brown mud SHUT UP YOU OLD SON OF BITCH SHUT UP BEFORE I (I could see Henry’s fingers on the trigger I could see Grandpa reach for the shotgun, I could see the jersey breech-birthing by the creek when I heard. . .) you as much a bastard as that sissy boy of Clara’s In 1949, I now understood why the kids at school whispered behind my back, and why I’d best stay away from some of the older kids. I understood that the difference between an Okie and a drunk Georgia redneck was far less than the 60 years that separated them when they first stepped into brown Cascade mud. in ‘49 they buried Henry in the valley plot Grandma went to live with Mabel her world confined to broadcasts of the Reverend Jimmy Tomlison of the Church of Living Fires of Atlanta Georgia and I with Olive in ‘49 Grandpa sat on the porch of the house where his children were birthed and watched Henry and the Jersey die until he could not tell which was which in ‘51 Dorothy was buried next to Henry I caught rheumatic fever and Mother came home for Dorothy’s funeral married to another Hank from over Bartown way Second Place Wind thumps the windows this winter night
and floating candles flicker, white roses glow
in a glass vase on a mirror table-
the room more than inhabited
by crenellated books along the walls,
more than defined by statuettes
of female deities and the temple bell
that make the upright piano an altar
and silence the moment's hymn.
*
Of course, in the sublime world
a single body yields a single thought,
and that planet hovers in a yawn
from lips too beautiful to speak a truth.
In this way imagination incorporates
the occasional flame of a city
or the hands as perfect as death.
*
Someday that unitary mind will become
apparent in the act of looking
at one another. Meanwhile, there are prayers
in every pause, a choir of commas
sorting the next sanctus
from the last, all this living made plain:-
how violins creased the air
and wine chilled tongues, the languid
blessing of time, the language
sitting through evening.
Even in such darkness, light persists.
Third Place Already less than beautiful, I start to fade my way to nothing. Impatient bones tilt naked, stopped en route to surface grandeur by this pesky skin. They press against my clothes in awkward places. Soon nothing will be left. Radiant hope is toxic, strips me bare. I can stare into the gaping black and smile with all the teeth I have left. Mark's wife died today and I can't recall her name. This is the worst part of it for me: betrayals that I never planned. I should send flowers. I should weep. I should tremble but I am tired and there just needs to be one good place to lie down. Honorable Mention My gal is like an old stove, looking stern as a senior nurse in chunky white, but when she gets that special twist she needs to turn her on, she's cooking hot. II Most nights, my gal just says she's much too tired, and curls herself tight as a mache ball, but on mornings when she's perky, and her petals fly like ololiuqui, . so sweetly open, she rouses me so that I can't find the door where conscience says I should be hard at work. Honorable Mention It's closer to where the sun rubs shoulders with earth. She trucks up the hill in white habit puffing with the breeze, her face flushed, a sister sporting black Reeboks, as I count my blessings, cruising down the other side in a SUV, taking a cocktail-smoke. Praise the sleight of a higher hand for slow-motion around long curves on steep slopes for different slants on a shared groove for the flash from passing glimpses (or maybe it was a kinda deja-vu) in the sign of a glance we exchange graces - my stereo and her vesper in the name of the Father both turned up in unexpected imperfect 3 part harmony. She & I, we relishing in the same crossing of the light. Honorable Mention I am from Atlantic famous sky Kerouac and I In Barstow, having sailed to Frog Pond and back A stop in San Juan Capistrano for a pack of cigarettes a box of Kleenex for our arguments and a pen and paper for our poetry Back in the car, he drives without speaking, speeding desert highway, sideways I am sitting looking at the side of his freshly shaven face craving Mexico savoring his words left behind under a burnt out Texaco sign “Jack I love you.” I say He sighs and recites me some Hawaii Five O haiku “Fuck you.” I say “I love you too.” He smiles Santa Monica, Malibu, West Hollywood Henry Miller for dinner Johnny Depp for dessert sex as a bedtime snack whispers under a window sill smoking, choking, provoking I hear him laughing over acoustic music I leave and slide into a booth next to a movie star at the back of a barroom, bored We kiss and I confess I am a poet Though I won’t reveal my truest verses I want a funk mobile, glockenspiel Give me back my vinyl records my electric typewriter, my pillow talk Jack, I’m sorry I fear your loathing I adore your roadside attraction but I like cappuccino and cheap wine I don’t like dirty fingernails and broken promises You’re the devil in my boots Baby I can quit you cold turkey hook up with a rock and roll show hide behind the harmonica and dance I will find it hard to be alone but I can’t be your home, your Hollywood your hell I will settle in Venice and take up tennis publish a book, get on TV teach English and smoke cigars cut off my hair and change my name believe in intercourse as an appetizer a good night kiss as the main meal Jack, in the car driving beyond the Vegas strip I love you no doubt How about Mexico in September? How about the Atlantic? You, the ocean, I and the famous sky. Honorable Mention The thing about colors said the artist, is that they kiss each other in such a way that you can not tell where the negative area ends and the positive one begins. For example, he continued, if you look at this black area of paint you think of, let’s say, a cave and if the black is kissed by white you think the cave’s mouth is washed by ocean’s foam and somehow if you move your eyes from black to white or the other way around you see the cave as a tunnel from where the water rushes out and falls off through rocks as it’s hit by sun and you think you see a little canoe with people in it, winding over a slightly raging wave, about to get swallowed up by the waterfall but then you look closer and you see that’s just a brush stroke...illusion, the secret wooing of the artist’s hand and you say, aha, that’s what maestro is trying to show me, and you leave the studio but you’re still in the cave. Honorable Mention Dorothy, you landed on the unkindest of circumstances and donned the ruby red stilettos that you'd coveted (dance, dance 'til your soul gives out!) They said you'd be safe with them on but instead you were accosted by little men and your stilettos go click click click on the broken yellow line of the pavement. It's a long journey, girl and you've had different companions no Heart, no Brains, no Balls, adventures every night. (Once you passed by the figure of Lot's wife - empty eyes staring back at your hard-won street corner.) You got waylaid in a field of poppies, opium dreams, babygirl. Your bucket of water melting down the evil thoughts; spoon candle needle rubberband The Promised Land shimmering green on the horizon. But there's lies there too, baby, Ruby Red, Snow White. Honorable Mention I imagine I see in Grandmother’s eyes the Cuba I have never known, the Caribbean that sings in my blood, ocean breezes humming and swaying across powdered sugar to long-silent Congas. In Miami, my feet tap, hips swing, to Merengue beat, red blue yellow in fevered swirling masses. Old men remember town squares and sidewalk dominoes, in Guayaveras, guitars playing memories only my elders hold on to. Grandmother’s skin shimmers, deserts under sun’s heat built into hand woven basket bazaars, fruit vegetable marketplaces beneath palm fronds. Jade among buff silk lands, copper throats and silver hands, hidden by veils, look back from photos of great uncles and distant parents. Customs of Moorish invasions linger behind emerald eyes and fair skin. Yet I see them in faces, names like Perez. The land forty shades of green called in my dreams, laughed in my tears when I walked the paths caught between mountain and ocean. Meadows yellow with cups awakened the Celts, ancestors’ worship of plants, animals, rhythms, mysticism in celestial grounds and oak sanctuaries. I knew a life here once and wept again when I left it, the sorrow of loss, the joy of finding more heritage. Honorable Mention Skin almost iridescent black, balding, boxer's nose, thick lips set in sensual pout around the mouth-harp, he blows tradition from a century past. Nodding at me over the microphone when the bridge comes around It's solo time for Mr. Lucky. Forget technique and education these people want to hear my soul - the scarred-up white boy playing piano for a legend. Brown eyes watch, suspicious at first slowly giving it up starting to move. This is my chance to erase boundaries, change all colors to blues. He never acknowledges and blows a new riff. At dawn he turns slowly, asks me to write letters home to his wife translates stumbling emotions of the road as the bus pulls into Atlanta.
April 2001 First Place (Co-Winner) Vim vixens--remember them?--dance
the Platelet Spin, look sharp
as scissors, cut out
concepts beyond Thomas's doubt.
It starts a simple two step
until frenzy carries them.
I didn't know that bones could
bend that way, she said.
The famished farmer
reads seed packets, envious
of the wind. The ghost
tries to kindle comfort:
We all start
somewhere, in a howl,
a patella's jerk,
a doctor's stern look
up the vagina.
Oh, such fancy vestibules,
housing the mystery of repetition.
Floods, not Noah's, flames, not Lot's
but inklings of petals,
soggy either with nurturing rain
or with mortal mnemonic blood,
rising to the sun,
rising red to cry
or spew sons
into Darwin's ghetto.
Pleasure, like a thimble
on a thumb, protects
us from the realization of raw servitude
to the dumb gears that grind tears
to seed, to bread, to vomit
nameless in their forsaking.
A gaunt guitarist
thumbs an anthem.
The ants dance
glottal curves,
grunt like internecine parrots
pecking at the space of heart.
We are wide in the ranging
of masquerading mind.
The dancers think they think
the only news.
But they die lowly, not differently,
to Bach, to Berry as to hip-hop
gutterals, drawers billowing
like flowers, from flowers
dropping petal and seed
Pressed memory in Bibles!
spastic in their conundrums,
but they see only smoothness
in their eyes' mirrors.
Oh, evil genius of all
Spanish Prisoners
So, heave your
original breaths
that steam even those mirrors
until you can't see yourselves.
This is interdiction
of all but lucky spasm
without mirrors.
This ecology mesmerizes.
Suddenly last summer
is the only wish.
First Place (Co-Winner) i.
She sings her disappearance
like adieu, gilded,
the era of bells tolling,
the slow fading: film’s white to gray,
credits rolling at the end.
Still, her aria
rings above her shrinking frame,
towers, then contracts --
her claim to solitude expanding;
the anointing of dusk before pitch,
her sanctuary, horizon’s shading light
pointed at the copper underbelly
of silence,
her own parading conversations
slipping mute into release.
We listen in, familial edges losing ground -
the echoing pledges of allies nearly present.
Rapt, her paling face
slows kindly;
solace scoops out its velvet nest,
its resting place, this scratchy hibernation.
In the tender palm of her chair,
embracing worn letters
with fingers still exquisite,
only the racing squirrels
witness her leisurely departure,
barter at her window,
wise to the dusted sparrows
squabbling over crumbs
and her attention.
She replies to them all,
whistles her giving, her solo,
her melancholy quarter-grin offered
to the invisible applause
of friends,
the laudable mention
of distant recall -
while the pull of tide going out
renovates her sliding in, castles yielding.
ii.
Ancient islands of the Aegean
pace their seasons,
sliced and pocked by tourists
swarming to hone wonder for themselves:
the breeding of oracles,
one-eyed titans forming,
gods greater than reason.
I wander, seeking:
the journey’s promise,
the trusted hand of my lover
drinking my own governmental pleasure;
the lanes of collar and neck,
thicket of strong limbs
steering, tongues caught on breath
like cinders in a cry of brick,
searing, then curling away -
From the pyre of riddling heat
to the slate blown shimmer of basting rock,
I grieve for the organic.
Everywhere the dead touch,
the honoring of ruins,
the melting of lapis,
absence wooing beauty:
the aged coupling, the rain-fed sweet,
the festival, the fast.
In the temple, opulence once wed
the dancing of fruit;
its flowering granted, then passed to the next
with gangling blooms soaring,
then losing scent -
the fleeting islet of shoots,
the chanting of sea grass,
this stark plain of barren earth
spent and discoloring,
adjoined to ages
that set their feathering roots
to wet haven, adorned,
moored in amber arcing light.
Ogling my own adventure,
I preen --
the climbing up, avaricious --
O the plenitude! The power
of pinnacle reached!
Then the slow and reluctant
trailing down, bright regret
clamoring for the jutting ledge,
glimmering in the encroaching pool,
the stammering beach -
The night runner amasses his laurels,
cool in his cloudy crown,
the vital passing the weary --
the going up,
the coming down,
the heavy robe of elation.
iii.
Once, she cruised these seas
on a great ship, the time of great ships;
the resolute view of the young.
Was this her sacred berth
like mine, this filtered place
of honeyed dust? Her loving
sung in clean bungalows
of white and blue, midnight stretches cool
under tender foot?
Blistering in my own
red descent from Delos,
I look beyond:
to lands cantilevered --
companionable pillars of sea foam smoke.
I look outward:
rugged hands of coast;
downward:
the delicate lift, seductive shallows.
I listen:
time sifts through the musing
bells of sirens,
the cry of spirits,
the agonizing beauty
of the climb.
The jagged line
of burnished rock clatters
against the azure sky.
Showers peal
their chill resounding duty,
greeting ragged cliff and flats,
pounding present from past,
the brittle seat of defection.
iv.
Blazing in its heat,
the liquidation of races
cleaves its own shrill metallic shadow,
deadbolt slabs fork and heave,
deliberate steps,
the allure of the kill,
of razing civilization.
We hum and croon the erection
of grand monument.
We mourn the fall,
bronzed images cast relentlessly
from grace, dreams sucked from lips -
I circle a thought:
one toe tracing a milky stone
in the dismissive water --
Facing the long path down,
her winnowing song of flesh and bone
braced itself
long after spirit bent, and gave.
Only the lilting of branches
brushed against her window’s glass
aroused a quickening
at the end:
a fluttering recollection of pleasure,
the colors of voyage,
eyes hushed
in the skirmishing of grave whispers,
beating of wings.
v.
Gathered up around her intent,
a shuttering shawl, her prayer,
the cruel closing of portals
renders her once glorious ride
a flicker -
the passionate press of stippling air
against my own stranger’s gaze-
At last, I surrender
to letting go,
the palest epitaph of salt and wind,
reclusive flight, her eloquent choice,
our bridge of sandy sorrow.
I surrender, chasing still
the perfect holding of her trebled voice;
the scattering of rest, slaking of loss;
one pebble,
breaking against the returning tide.
Second Place The streets are the theme in a hanging mural of fog... Scratched and torn dollar- a-hope tickets litter a bus stop in southwest Seattle. Day laborers and I sit on knocked down shopping carts, and wait. Local pigeons binge on crumbs; bums are hungry, but not hungry enough to bag these feathered free lunches. A sixteen-year-old school girl, wearing a mask of rouge-evil, walks by my much obliged middle-aged eyes as the soaked grey air melts her blue mascara. It runs thick through my rump-romp thoughts. The sun Tom-peeps through the broken pane of a cloud. A yellow Camaro, with black and tweetered interior, booms the happy Big Band sound that spiked the punch of music long before Cobain's grunge and angst hardened the rain that loves this emerald city. Third Place I walk to the edge of the yard barefoot to fetch yesterday's news. Tottering between last dark and first light, morning is almost a question. Yes, the sun comes up again. My three-year-old is amazed by the earth's consistency. There are things that still amaze me, simple things -- the muscle tick on a horse's thigh, the scent that lingers after love, the skewed lament of a crazy girl's cry. In Michigan we lived on Hoover Street next-door to the Crazy Girl, what we called her, we being my wife and I. The girl lived in the house with her mom and dad. She talked to herself, argued. It seems those days, houses were closer together, walls thinner. We heard her through open windows. She stood outside for hours, or sat in her car. It wasn't the words we heard but the tone of her voice, calm or suddenly rising. Although sometimes we passed, coming or going, we never spoke. Then one day she was gone and I found myself missing her the way a favorite shirt, sleeves worn away, is missed. And so I began to talk to myself, gentle arguments, debates. That summer, a raccoon took residence in the walls of our attic. I worked nights and so never heard the claws ticking against drywall. My wife did and would describe the sounds. It was as if the house were haunted, as if the crazy girl had come back. I thought my wife had taken a step in that direction. I never heard the sounds myself. Then, one early evening, I saw a raccoon the size of a small dog waddle across our yard and down the street as if she owned the neighborhood. She did. A few nights later, when we were sure she was out prowling, we boarded up the hole that gave her entrance to our life. I digress. What I want to say is the horse becomes part of the field, love settles If we work it just right, the world doesn't matter. We go on in sadness, in love, in the lost song of a mad girl who we claim to be our own. Honorable Mention I. What color is a peal of bells? Can a thunder-roll smell of cinnamon? How warm is a suit made from a tissue of lies? Should it be worn with a buttonhole? II. How far can a dog bring a snowflake on its nose? Why doesn't the sea taste of shipwrecks? How soft is a single heartbeat? Does death dance deftly? III. Is a cat's claw too quick? What became of last summer's moonbeams? Will walls always be so wide? Is love's last question hiding behind the first lie? IV. Why should carriage clocks care about glaciers? If a red shoe is lost, will its partner be blue? Is a spoon deep enough to carry a wish to the mountain? Will rubbing a lantern raise its luster? V. Do birds sing in straight lines? When will a poem lose its voice? Should brand-new answers be trusted? Why don't rainbows hunt in packs? Honorable Mention When you sit over my legs tickling my belly, you’re a crazy old man worshiping my Chi with hands, eyes and chants in a language I’ve never heard but understand. Then, when you lock your hands with mine coming down to seize my lips, you’re the cataract of vim; your lips splash on my peripherals overtake all my portals no longer traveling the outskirts, you're in. Honorable Mention I. Mornings I harrow, afternoons harvest heirloom tomatoes. Nights I eat the seeds, spit the flesh. Staked to square trellises and clipped stem-tight, they never fail to thrive for me. Plump Burbanks, pinkskinned Brandywines people the vines like fairytale children in a small town warlock's kitchen garden. One hour too long in the sun and they burst. The skinny lady in the floppy hat and matching floral gloves stops by again. "Looking good," she says, inserting her chin between the pickets. "You are kind," I say. II. By day I watch him from the third floor study, sweating in his perfect patch. The sun sinks into his broad back with fangs I imagine my own. While I chew bacon in the sandwich my wife makes, she walks the fence to him, returns soon -- flushed and gratified. God! She beds early, never sees him naked, rabid, rolling in nettles by the shed, shreds of neighborhood witches in his teeth. Honorable Mention We lay twins under cool sheets in black night. Our singular heat an island in a cold sea. His hands ask the question he no longer voices. Hands that move gently, tentativley the length of me to span and cup; the tender belly- a temple of pain where hurt was born and grew strong. Surgical signatures map repeated invasions wars waged by sterile troops wielding Doctorates and sharp knives. Too late they shook their heads placed on a silver scale my hope my terror my despair. My womb blasted, diseased weighed ninety grams. Pain escaped before the seige. Virgin territory Dark interiors Prowling, indulging grim amusements, climbing into our bed. We huddle like twins an island. My husband, my refuge I thrill to him, need the music of his slow kiss- the holy communion of lips and eyes. Narcotics two white tablets 500 MG a toxic currency to buy back time. My lover, flowing lays his forehead on mine rubs his cheek to it's mate knows soon relief will come. He will feel it move away. Curtains, spring damp blow fragrant cool sheets, tropic island. He sleeps, no longer twin. Tangled, a celtic rune I erase the language of our love. Ease away from the weight and angles of our satisfaction. I sit cross legged, smoking communing with Jesus on the wall forever dying on polished rosewood. I will pray to other gods. To the wind, Venus in a dark sky. The clock glows electric hours. Soon it begins, I will not sleep. Pain waits patiently to renew the seige. Honorable Mention I took down an old book today, blew off the dust and settled in to read some poems from the sixties. They were long and moldy, filled with tales of carnage and blood and gasses and medals of honor, death rewarded with a Purple Heart; the long-awaited flight home made in a zippered bag. The bad guys still wore black. Bleeding children as naked as the trees. Did the trees also scream and writhe in ignorance. Or were they simply silent, dead witnesses. I turn the pages, silent hope for reprieve, but none came. Academicians igniting flags that fan the flames of their indignation, using social and racial injustices for kindling. Fighting here, stead of jungle soil. Memories not my own, and lead weight in my stomach forces me to turn the page. And read more of the same. Of assassination, of convoluted theorem. Conceptual images of our future dashed again and again and again. Until my head hung down under the weight of the National Guard, the CIA, and a decade of shame. What of the pretty lyrics I still recall, sugar-plumbed sounds filling the air. Promised me love that grows, safe harbor under your umbrella. Peace and love but a fantasy to be sure, else a dream, albeit an appealing one. Where have all the young girls gone, flowers in their hair, flowers everywhere. Smiley faces, bright as moons sewn on denim, frayed and belled heralding a rebirth. If one came, it was muted. Aquarius never dawned. I didn't read of it in the papers, nor was it announced on the evening news. But, Jupiter did align with Mars and, united, we took that one small step for man. A giant leap for mankind. Words that did not reach the ears of Charlie, squatting in the hills of Spahn Ranch. Helter skelter marked the end with crosses carved in skin. Day-dream believer still, I close the book wondering if the colors of Peter Max were ever real. Honorable Mention remember how the girl smiled with trance on her face in the second row in ms. stuarts' english class. you knew she'd done the nasty not because billy bragged but because the smile meant that he had kissed her big as a movie screen. she ran the tip of her finger over her lips, so lost that they puckered in a slo-mo replay for the boys. you had to respect love like that. so you trashed her in fifth period gym slappin b-ball and elbows and insults at billy, making him sorry he ever did her what a slut, who hasn't the bitch opened her legs for, no matter he's been hitting on her since they first started dating 6 months ago. i think it's significant that boys hit on girls. cos it's like a slap into reality when all the bitches from the pep squad gather in the corner and heather whispers loud about the usual taboos, and how billy was hittin on her just a week before, and her green eyes slither sideways like fangs to their mark who jerks her finger from her lips , the bruise just beginning to rise.
May 2001 First Place If they had bundled you home in blue flannel, crepe paper draped from the walls, your shrill cry filling the room with balloons, moon-faced; ratcheting the air like an upturned beetle, fat and white as a thumb left too long in water, and trundled you into the bed next to me, I would have been afraid. The nurse tapped her watch, covered your eyes with a towel and blotted your toes. All I ever knew of you was a name tattooed on a stretch of vellum, and one black footprint stepping off the page. Second Place Sweeping low over the winking guns of the fleets, Torpedo to strike, pounce a trigger, Out of the sun the Mitsubishis, Hit, shatter, hit, shatter, This is no Tyrone Power huge in movie gloom, This is some college kid burning to death, plunging toward the Pacific, A kitchen-calendar Jesus fades in and out, in and out, as the blue becomes huge. Third Place Throughout these latest years she's sat and spun the threads of each calm day, and woven tight and fast the cloak that covered everyone she loved, and locked all doors against the blight. To no avail, apparently, despite her care the threads unravel one by one, the locks unpick, and open onto night-- it's Rumplestiltskin, come to claim her son. And now the common girl who once was bold enough to charm a prince and trick a sprite, who never learned to change the straw to gold, stands powerless against the monster's right. She reaches with her hands toward a cold abyss she cannot name, or touch, or hold. Honorable Mention Yeah Dad, I heard that squat son of a bitch wind up, wind up and flag me good across the butt cheeks. Then the tall one lashed and he knew how to swing a whip, nine swine skin thongs trimmed with twin lead rays flaying broad across my trapezoid. Then the short one hit, and the tall one, and he hit, and he hit, and Israel sung Hossana, falsetto Halleluias as skin tore, veins and capillaries juiced. Arteries sprayed as Judea raved and centurions driveled to naked muscle of whimpering messiah, backskin red in dancing ribbons, flapping to Zion’s temperate gusts. My flesh was made an octopus of tissue, so the Italians stopped. And I slumped to the courtyard, cramping, cursing, sticky. Centurions sang my kingdom, robed my wet topography in purple velvet, tacked some t!horny firebranch to my scalp-- veiny as your Hebrews. They shouted, touting the centurion stour. Stew them in pogrom, I prayed. Evermore spit baptismal pogrom--cook the Levites in rank sulfur, hurry patience to Armageddon, boil kike fungus in Gehenna! your hell smear peace. And they gave me a branch for a scepter, and bitchslapped me and called me pretty, then cudgeled my crown with that branch, slu! rping when my scalp blood blotted their headgear. But Dad, I loved Italian virtue, cried Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani and Fuck Elijah! And tearing my robe off they crabbed the flogging, stripping blood and serum from suckling clots. My wounds curdled, caked, were splashed in lime juice; my eyes gargled crimson. They membraned my shit-meat to humor your people, and saddled the cross arm-- the hundred-pound timber gouging the armspan it would sport. The splinte!red lumber nested in your pigeon-king Father! I hit t!he deck. Write what you will of my piety, but with Skull Hill 650 yards away, you think I did not bitch? Yeah, Mikey and Gabe strained their collars. Honorable Mention this may be the last room these the last shadows on polished wood your bracelets on this table (yes and you traced with your finger circles in the grain of pine) the birds you painted across the wall the bowls you made these yellow flowers this air on my skin as you pass this need to taste your teeth to read the maps of your mouth to press into you to eat your hair this stained floor and your feet blue veined and painted this may be the last time of waiting for the shift of air as you open the door from the street Honorable Mention I. I haven't ever had a child of my own. Now, I don't think it makes me less a person Never to have grown a person inside me. Still... When I heard him say, "A Woman's defining moment is when she gives birth," I admit I felt a twinge of regret At all the could-have-beens Before I faced him squarely and said, "I am Not less fulfilled because I haven't seen Myself round and full and fertile. I have found my definition By making different choices." I spoke the truth. But... It's a part of womanhood I've always wanted, A child of my own. II. I cringe When I hear them say, "So when do you two think you'll start a family?" Some people Are worse than the IRS or insurance forms For asking nosy questions. I think I'll get a t-shirt, Paint an arrow on it, pointing to my womb, And write: "This space intentionally left blank." III. Last Sunday, see, I accidentally almost killed the woman next to me in the pew. I think I could have beat her with my prayer book, if I hadn't been so busy trying to remember whether turning the other cheek meant that I shouldn't tell her to mind her own damn business when she reminded me the Bible said, "go forth and multiply," and coyly asked when we were planning to do our part. I'm pretty sure I could have beat the rap, pleaded temporary insanity due to grief, two failed adoptions, and infertility IV. She wears pregnancy proudly, A badge of womanhood. She flirts flashing eyes And rolls full hips, Maternity blouse swinging With milk-engorged breasts. Like a Cochiti storyteller, Or the Madonna of Renaissance art, Artlessly She flaunts fertility. Honorable Mention To love him is a matter of building brick and gold walls, splashing in hot weather, walking in cold feet. It is to build a weir by day and tear it down by night, speak in silent voices from many cages deep. It is to plant a tree that bends this way and that and while the apples never fall the ground stays apple full. It is to pick the black fish from white waters inside his eyes for a new purpose under our sun. It is a matter of telling him of love and what suffices, a song I sing to hush all his surrounding noises.
June 2001 First Place I. Been workin' 'Bama levees, love, better'n half my days, half again more my nights. Got me gear aplenty -- big rubber coat, buckets, barrows, sandbags, spades, nasty little Bobcat clutch rid through, hipboots, knotted arms could choke an oak, love, in their crook from the dirty work of keepin' dry. Muddy river, she don't stand half a chance on a double-bitchdog dare of bustin' loose me on watch. Come some lame storm, love, sends wives and Preacher Bill to Revelations bawlin' deluge, hopin' heaven, cobblin' arks, I swagger bulwarks like cock his coop, glare the yellow water back, forge the banks by force of will. II. It's drizzle done me in. A simple, wet spring. Months she sneaked insidious up -- slicked the mud, love, under foot, rose the river dangerous. Tonight my waders, sudden logged, tug me under. Shovel's gone. Bobcat's mudded down. Wonder how I missed knee deep. Sirens scream the breach -- my failure, my cropper -- to the sleeping town. Nothin' for it now but swim, love, swim. Love? Don't know how. Second Place Mother and I left him his clarinet, since it couldn't be used for bodily harm. He plays "Melancholy Baby" over and over, eyes closed as if in a trance, forgets the final line and cadence. Those calm limpid eyes still flare in a second lights flicker and crackle, angry nurses sprint in with restraints braced for another episode. Repeating meaningless syllables as the drugs take effect he looks over suddenly at me starts to hum the lullaby he used to play at bedtime smiles as hairs rise on my arms. My sister grows apples out West somewhere. She sent him a box of rotten ones once. The son of a bitch used to whip scars into our backs and legs did things to us we choose not to recall played Benny Goodman as we kept our eyes fixed on the floor explained the beautiful abstract nature of jazz threw his wine goblet at our cowering mother who secretly taught us Chopin. Third Place His hair a thicket, voice a rasping saw that cut through cant and conscience's decay-- my scruffy hero channeled youth's dismay and changed the world in 1964. His music called to me: I heard with awe wild songs that wheeled and soared above the day then, swooping, drove indifference away. Glad to be young, I stood at heaven's door. He calls again, and how could I resist a ragged clown behind a reverie still chasing wraiths within the day's grey mist? It's darker now: I cannot sense or see a way ahead, but I can dance. Hey! Mist- er Tambourine man, play a song for me. Honorable Mention Once, among the high grasses of the birthing-field, you wondered if the thrush knew lyrics to music she has carried since first flight, if the glide given the roll of her throat sounds from a place untaught to her, its pith long vanished with the dulling of the eggtooth, the rend of the blue shell hush. You asked what words I thought she might be singing, and for weeks I listened, unriddling. Last evening I watched her kneel at a halo of string and drybrittle vine, tend a trinity of songs kept secret there and rhythmned to the beat and taper of soon- rising wings. I saw them strain into the dark of her fauces where the blind worm remembers to them the old dust hymns, the red clay songs patterned from the lay of the earth, epiphanies of sylph-hollow voices sung from the rot. This morning their trilling woke me from other worlds, and I stumbled into my own to find you staring toward me in the fog of the mirror. You lay your palm against mine, and we cleared the faces of the glass, tilted its frame to better angle the light; I imagined you walking toward the gates, blinking. You reflected in the florescents for the breadth of a dampened moment, but faded when my son was brought to me, was nested in the bend of my arms. He pats at my mouth, grabs my tongue, blathers and coos strange songs to me, flame-blue eyes God-deep with sudden questions. I lean to whisper, hair tumbling willow and dark, to find you humming somewhere beneath the heat of his breath. Though we do not know the words, he and I, we sing you back from the silence of the stones, back from the rift of the dead still crumbling, from the soundless settle of the long cold. Honorable Mention She lies. Swears never again to disturb him, yet tonight, tiptoeing silent downstairs in the dark, everyone in bed, she digs him up, inspects him, a month after her brother had soaped, and bathed him in a sink of scalding water. Scabby knees itch, rest on the cool ground as small fingers unearth Gordon from his tiny grave below the forsythia near the splintery sand box and the swings. Fluted shell intact, the head lolls on her index finger with its torn nail. She strokes him as when she'd placed him in that soil, wonders when God will take him away or change him into somebody else. Honorable Mention Your leaving takes my legs out from under me. No longer may I walk with you, my leaping days through. I devise wooden pegs on stumps and hobble off balance whenever I think I see you. I reach for you, arm stubs in thin air. If you were in front of me, you would feel me bump and my weight as I topple face down. I install hooks and turn, gut wrench at night, you not really there. My heart tears out through all this. I try replacement, but it is too tricky. I hear or read your name and cannot compose myself. From nowhere comes your voice, smile for a kiss and I know I have lost my head. I would be nothing if it were not for phantom sensations. Honorable Mention A wisp of old woman, curved like a scythe, tottered to me as she fussed her shopping, her walking stick hooked on her chopstick wrist. She spoke to me then in a dried leaf voice. Inaudible there in that busy street, swept by rude gales from passing trucks. I leaned closer to hear: Mein eyes not gut. time for bus, ven comes it? "Which bus do you want?" She smiled, shook her head then sang to herself - and somebody else, in? not German. Yiddish - "Which bus?" She leaned towards me, her tiny claw reached to stroke my face. Du she said. Du Honorable Mention It is time to take tea: Earl Grey (iced, with thinly sliced lemon) or steaming Lapsang Souchong. The guests are seated in the garden: it is uncharacteristically warm. Yes, and the air heavy with lilac. His plumed helmet, sword and K were boxed long ago. There are no servants. His wife will pour. Later, when they are settled, he will speak of Lamu: the hiss of baboons on a dry dirt runway; cold showers in Petley's, where he sketched dhows on Sunday afternoons. They will forget pain and pensions, cataracts, angina and the irritation of drafting wills. The Chardonnay (perfectly chilled) comes from a cool climate where grapes ripen slowly. If pressed, he will recall high tea with the Sultan of Zanzibar; the delicate question of flags. notes: K: a knighthood. Lamu: an island/mainland (depending on the season) on the coast of Kenya. Dhows: ships common in the Indian Ocean. Honorable Mention All I have is this. Stop looking for anything else. No winking metaphors or zipped-up simile. No birds, no rocks, no trees. The title came to me last night. Nothing else happened. I didn't make love to a roan mare dressed in a shadow. My dead father didn't appear speaking in tongues. I have grown weary of waxing poetic. A good title. Nothing more. Let the poets turn nothing into bliss.
July 2001 First Place I sit on this bus reading a book written six years after your death. Here is a poem that speaks of loss-- compares it to rain that streams down gutters. I try to absorb it as though it were made of water, yet cannot, for the words run off me, like losing you never did. The green world rolls by, and I think of how grief is so much more like the fallen snow. It is heavy sadness that cloaks those who can do nothing but stand still, allowing it to fall upon shoulders in sheets, and sheets, fierce wind piling it into drifts of uncertainty. It is ten-o'clock when we lose you, your legs buckle and you fall backward onto the couch. I do not see this, I am filling your bath -- the first one in days, you would not allow us to bathe you until now. I hear mom scream like I've never before heard her voice, this high-pitched shriek that jets through the house, winds around corners of walls and splinters off in my ears, like wood breaking. I run. You are paler than I have ever seen you, blue eyes open, as though seeing someone you haven't in a long while, your shoulder propped up by a couch cushion so that your head lolls in an unnatural state. You are not breathing, and mom is still screaming, "Bill - don't do this to me, not now!" My future husband is standing in back of the couch looking at you, at me, at mom. He paces. I put my hand on your chest, my ear to your face-- my hand to your neck, your wrist-- there is nothing, no breath, no light. I yell out, "Call 911." Paul panics and asks me what the number is. I pull the cushion from under you and shout, "911." You now lay flat, and I tilt back your head with my palm, put my hand under your neck like I was taught in summer camp. I sweep my fingers through your mouth, pull out your dentures and throw them on the coffee table. I breathe for you, my mouth on yours-- my breath, your breath, I inhale staleness, Daddy, I can taste the cancer. But I can't bring you back. Final layer blown hard by frigid air, so solid, that if someone were to step out onto it, they might fall through in implosion. I am numb, there is no other word to describe it, Dad, no other word does justice to this lack of sensation. I'm looking at you in the casket, great American flag cocooning the mahogany, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, but this pain that seems to well up in my chest every now and again, and overflow like last night's bathwater. "He hardly looks like Bill," I hear the whispers nobody thinks I can hear, the cautious comments made from behind finger covered hands, "So sad to lose him so young, such a waste." These words do not affect me, but instead drift over me, like dust. I never thought you'd actually die, Daddy -- you seemed too full of life to ever be empty. Your body in the coffin, the minister speaks. I do not hear him. I hold mom as she cries, I comfort my sister. I hold Paul in my arms, and somehow, I hold myself together. Pure in intention, white inevitably turns to gray, as the guilt of the forgetting begins. Mom sold the house today, Dad. I don't think I've ever felt such melancholy in my life. It was as if she doesn't want to remember you anymore. perhaps it's too painful for her, I see you in everything here: on the dock, net in hand, trying to catch the elusive blue crab -- by the piano listening to Kelly play a song for the seventeenth time -- on that chair, with little hair left, bottle of morphine by your side. I still hear your voice here, I still expect your car to pull up in the drive, your footsteps on the walk, your hello from the front door. . . We will try to forget you now, this house sold, this door to our family history at a close. Ultimately, thaw will melt sadness into pools of slush until nothing remains but tufts of grass, the memory of the storm, and of the warm autumn days before it. I don't know when it happened, Dad, but somehow the pain has lessened-- It has drifted off, ebbed day by day, I dreamt of you again last night. You were healthy, I was young and on that old tire swing, the one you put up in New Hope when we were children. I asked you to push me, and you did, "Higher, Daddy, higher!" I flew through the low blue sky, pumped my feet like you taught me and stretched them out in front of me, as thought I could touch the clouds. You were smiling, I was laughing, and autumn leaves were falling . . . The bus pulls into its stop I close the book and think-- here is a poem that speaks of loss. Second Place Two klics outside the port city, thick underbrush hid clusters of olive clad kids, bellies flat against slick earth wet with mud and blood. Days here went fast into night, and when dark came, you prayed for light. Nights were bad, you listened with strained ears through a din of strange sounds, for sounds that were stranger still. Most times, constant fear kept you awake in apprehension, like the mummy did in the fifth grade; trembling in your G.I. Joe sleeping bag on Timmy McPherson's living room floor. None of us knew scared like this, but we all caught on real quick. Our backyard battle plans and monster movie anecdotes didn't apply in this show. By the second night in the bush, we had all lost faith in Hollywood. Somebody forgot to yell cut so the stand-ins could take their places. It all made you wonder what Audie was singing about. Sometimes, you imagined that you smelled fish sauce, heavy, oily; the sour odor of charlies with full bellies. Ready to hunt all night on papered feet, mute yellow draculas with a taste for cold blood. Every now and then we got lucky, and the point man would hear the low squeak of black silk bat wings in time to thwart the midnight buffet. But most times we weren't lucky, and some of us joined the army of the undead; coming back to feast within the nightmares of the rest of us. And we wondered what G.I. Joe might do on a bad night in Haiphong, where the matinee horrors were real, and none of us could find the zippers down the backs of the monster suits. Third Place i've touched seen tasted all of your skin i've seen you lie i've seen you standing among trees in half light waiting for a reason to weave flowers between your legs and today i read your letter: parallel lines on unlined paper (i remember you standing your back to light your face not visible only your body through cotton and silk) you're living now in minnesota with an accountant a tall man who knows about antelopes and maps and you cook the fish he brings on saturdays there are lines on your belly and you wear glasses to read you can see industry from your high window and you won't return to england you're writing this letter at 2.30pm alone in the house until 7 you don't wear bracelets now and only 1 ring you know my address is the same and hope that the voodoo girl is dead until today you kept the words i wrote in that pewter box from brighton today the stove has them and the box sank quickly (i remember you naked at 3am in that room on montrell road - gas pipes and dirty pans - searching for candles and no money for the meter) you hear me still in english phrases and in fields through a windshield you've asked a priest for absolution and you're writing this letter (remember your head bent over paper in that room with icons on the wall and hanging plants touching) across my face and signing it across my mouth i'll read your letter again today and tomorrow and at night when there's snow this one page: parallel lines on unlined paper no address Honorable Mention What's left? Maybe some trees on a hillside or the sudden tufts of seedy grass where your wanting arms, your lost in the world feet might be. I have forgotten the names of the trees. Broadleaf grin, burred twig dance, maker of saplings. What's left? Some trees, a hillside. No philosophizing, please. Vodka is given us to be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited. Snow to be walked upon. For one evening anyway, I want to forget you are the ring in my ear, the morning's cough, the dense flour of deepest sleep. I wake and call for you. You are the new crease in my right palm, the itch below my knee, the world turned inside out, my reckless heart. I pull on socks, shoes. Beneath each layer is another. Madness wears the thinnest cloth. What's left? Dying and singing. Some trees. Honorable Mention like Orwell's crumbs the disturbed dust moves from one surface to another marking time in textured layers it covers all the people here as well the room is cleaned, the smells masked, but the dirt is organic it moves away from dusters and vacuum heads escaping to hang in bars of light and rest on people. perhaps this is new dust perhaps there is more dust here because skin is dryer hair looser, more fragile, in this made up place than outside where time still moves in an understood way I run my finger along the dark oak mantelpiece disturb a million lives and learn to measure time as the space between breaths Honorable Mention I walk around naked these clothes don't hide a thing I'd rather show tits and ass than have you see my feelings and never give a damn Honorable Mention It revolves, and makes a soothing sound that evokes the winds of autumn grieving for the child whose path is twisted, whose troubled silence speaks fear. Gandhi listened for a time and felt the colors of his faith revolving too, entwining there among threadbare longings, gaining silence from the spinning whispers. Patience is almost gentle in his heart as the thread of time emerges continuous, eternal, graceful and serene. And this thread is our connection to the majestic light of stars which still shine in Mahatma's eyes while he sits, humming softly, singing the wheel around. Honorable Mention I. I was one of those little girls that wanted a pony, not because I became mesmerized by Liz Taylor or needed a Flicka friend, but because ponies had long hair, all down the neck and out the back. That's how they came and went, with not a thought of stalling to tape their bangs. They see through fringe to check for limits and find no God in the eyes or Devil in the mouth. II. Have a pony, chilled gold to fit full inside my dainty grip. The opening seemed to bridle my nibbling lips. The guys fisted their Shlitz while we girls buried our aperitif beers under our hair until the males malted our way, then we'd whip our pony tails, rim our collarbones and grin for auction. III. I'm full and past bolting. Reined and ridden and snorting still. Don't brush against me, I command within steam. I've nodded and neighed, nostrils are full of foal that hooves for breath. Broken, I stirrup and rear my spindly child, her mane as wet as mine. Honorable Mention And he sang me to sleep... A sweet warmth of words comfortably embracing me. Sleep like a Godsend, Him my one-night idol. Goldy Locks with "parsley, sage, rosemary, and..." Time slipping through my fingers like the sun peering through the curtains. I closed my eyes before reality could pierce my mind. His soft voice gently echoing as I fell... To quickly, once again, in love. I fell off my bike. Me, a twenty-one year old, hitting pavement like a six year-old just learning to ride. A twenty-one year old trying to learn to ride again. Because I used to be able to do this without any hands, any hurts, any expectations, I could fly. But, instead I fell. My angelic wings clipped Newton's Law proven once again. Gravity is twice as strong when falling from Heaven. But, he sang like Irish Angels. And, he sang like my father once did. And, he sang like he was alone in his car. He sang like I was the only person who had ever heard. And, he sang like I would if I were staring at the face of God. And, he sang like I had always wanted someone, anyone, to... me. He sang and I fell. My dominoes of requirements and desires cascading like my hair across his chest. My dominoes exhausted from standing so goddamned long. My dominoes, like our bodies laying against each other finally able to touch something, feel something. He sang and I fell asleep. As if sleep were real and real a dream. Sleep like a wake-up call from the hotel front desk. Sleep like nap-time in a daycare. A twenty-one year old fighting a early bedtime. Because sleep isn't necessary when you are old enough to drink coffee. And, sleep is an ending, And, I am searching for beginnings. I am searching for new doors in old hallways. I am searching for my training wheels. I am searching for a way to rejuvenate my wings. I am searching for a new set of dominoes. I am searching for a way to prove Sir Fucking Isaac Newton wrong. I am searching for someone to sing me to sleep, their soft voice gently echoing as I fall... And, their arms to be there instead of the pavement. Honorable Mention I think I'll write a triolette-- but does it rhyme with get or gay? I'm ignorant I know, and yet I think I'll write a triolette that rhymes with gay--or else with get. (Who gives a toss whichever way?) I think I'll write a triolette-- but does it rhyme with get or gay?
August 2001 First Place It was no accident we wandered here, away from suburbs and from traffic din, we needed to be somewhere free to clear the dust and doldrums that remained within. The sweet vivacity of birds in heath land high above the sea as sky was wide, while quails in coveys bumbled round our feet, and sunlit, straight escarpments on each side proclaimed our isolation from the great metropolis, that seemed so out of place, like some Atlantis that might disappear without a noise and leaving not a trace. Incredible the silence and the vast expanse of air, like Prospero's desmesne, all insubstantial moving light that clasped each image and refracted it again. And we felt no surprise when downward came transparent parachutes in graceful fall from out the belly of an ancient plane, illuminated beings held in thrall by Prospero's enchantment, captive ghosts that floated slowly down till hid from view and the surrounding dreamscape of the coast forgot the aeroplane and floating crew. Below the cliffs the water came and went in lacey patterns overlapping those that came before, incessantly intent on black and white kaleidoscopic shows. Our need for earth's connection is so strong we sicken if deprived of wilderness, and if we stew in cities for too long we dwindle to adapt to our address. Wizened homunculi we all forget our ancestors emerged from out the wet; and fire and ice will each suffice, says Frost. We gained our cities but the rest is lost. Second Place Out of the sea-fog currawongs came back after an absence in the mountains; great black clanging birds, they sought clear air and found my bird table with smaller birds assembled, as yet unaware that fate had ended their security. I heard the trumpet tones and matched responses, saw the dark shapes in the branches and more swooping through the sky; uproarious jubilation ringing high, they celebrated their return to where they fed last spring and summer. Here they now could rear their hungry young until, as hoodlum birds the youngsters soar to mountain forests to absorb the law. Third Place Mom and Dad walk around the house in underwear. Someone rings the doorbell; I have to drag them by the hand into their bedroom then open the door myself, or else they'll answer it like that, because, as they say, this is summer, whoever it is, they'll understand. ii I go to sleep. Midnight has stepped in the room before me. The light is off. I do not turn it on, only approach the window and close it. A foot or two outside, through the black branches, a single yellow eye flickers- July firefly. iii I am five years old. The day 100 degrees. The bus packed with people, no air conditioning, more people standing shoulder to shoulder than people sitting. A gypsy pulls out her brown breast to feed the baby on her lap, her nipple so dark and wide, I swear, whoever sees her now feels none of the weather's heat or the crush. iv We are all kids of the same age. Every year we end school at the same time and hang out together like an army, every night. Lana is a dirty river that crosses through our town. We often play on its banks or cross it back and forth, and tonight playing hide and seek I go with a boy into a bunker near the river. You know, he says, we shouldn't hide here, see the sign, it says "Danger!" I see a skull drawn on the wall and two bones crossed above it and though I've heard people talk of someone living in here, I take his hand and say, it's ok, we'll only sneak as far as the entrance, not too deep in and at least here no one will come to look for us. v There she is, ripe, out of Botticelli's world, aware now that this is the summer when she finally shows off the woman she's opened into; her broad perfect shoulders and that slender waist! She shakes her head to get rid of the water in her ears then glances down the way young girls do to check for changes in their breast size every hour and there it is, the perfect imperfection, the wave has pulled down her top and her left breast peeks out. vi June, July, August. All the people have left their cars, their jobs, their houses and have come out together walking on the boulevard, up and down, telling stories, chasing after their children, chasing their dogs, holding hands, kissing, waving hello. June, July, August. In Albania, late in the afternoon, boulevards fill with the voices and laughter of the young and old walking in pairs, groups, holding hands. June, July, August. vii He sits in front of her, a fan between them turns its head slowly back and forth. He speaks to her, says, I love your summer shoulders bare like this, I love your hair down on your shoulders, I love your sitting before me and this fan between us that pulls my words from this end of the room and blows their bubbles out toward you. And when he finally whispers, I love you, in his lowest voice, the fan multiplies the words inside its cage and blows them out filling her room. viii A tiny fly lies frozen inside an ice cube I just picked to put in my glass of water, trapped the way an entire city is trapped inside the glass, in those novelty Christmas snowballs sold for $10 to $20 each. I sit for a minute wondering if I should use this ice cube or if it's sacred, a sort of tomb for this insignificance. In the end I stick it deep into the white beard growing from the freezer and get another for my water. ix Christy, a fair blonde with thin hair, goes to the market with her mom to buy tomatoes. In the afternoon her face looks slapped a dozen times. Two days later, her forehead starts peeling to her scalp. Johnny, the bully from our building, chases her yelling, leper, leper, I'll tell them all I saw your pepper if you don't let me kiss your salmon forehead. x The radio plays a hurried version of "Summertime." He turns, glances at her cotton shorts, looks at the high road rising toward the sunset, pulls over, turns off the car and they start driving at a different speed toward another sky. Honorable Mention An hour since turning in, and now: lightning, a long biding of time in the flashes, thunder. Beside me, you are fever and dream, you are rooms hollow as tumbled shells, and the hush of oceans within. You are slow, quiet tides of breathing. Light: one, two, three, thunder. Beneath the cover my hand lies at the narrows of your forearm, at scars softer than the skin before. I trace the length of mending layers, press warm, blue pulses, remember a month's past and the drumming of a thick rain, the black beat of the blades, and the wet hiss of streetspray ghosts. I remember the haunt of the siren, and later, ink: the spelling of our son's name on the curve of gauze circling your wrist, holding you in, lest you forget. Light: one, two, thunder. Lest you forget again, ever. There is a whispering at the doorway, there is a wisp and a rustling on the stair. Light: one, thunder. This thing, it comes only at night, only in storms. Light, light, thunder. Honorable Mention Junebug, it's late July; you're on your back. I watch you writhe like clockwork inching round and round, a chunk of amber measuring time in a slow tortured circle. You bumped and buzzed the porch light last night, spent yourself on the empty pursuit of an artificial moon. What drove you to waste your wings banging your head against illumination? It's dawn now; you've lost your flight. Your legs wriggle, reach for twigs and leaves and dirt; all you grab is air. I tip you right side up; propped on wobbly legs like a newborn calf learning how to stand, you waver, flip back over to spin the perimeter of your end. I meant no harm in the small mercy offered, never intended to interrupt the mechanism or tamper with the precision of your death. The sun crawls into the sky. Your revolutions slow like a watch winding down; the second hand hestitates, and you stop. I sweep your carapace from the step with the tattered kites of moths and the sarcophagus of a cicada. My pulse bumps and buzzes in my throat. Junebug, is your tiny death any less significant than mine?
September 2001 First Place Each course attempts to prepare us for the nude, that summation of shape and shadow, that end various and typical, reclining on a threadbare chaise. We sketched inverted vessels, recorded the face of the passenger opposite and commended it to practice, focused long on the rose's locus, its fleshy unfurling of gradation and purpose. More, we imagined paradox to heighten vision: the point without plane, an airborne orb rotating both ways, a line that begins in the palm and extends forever. Steadiest of laymen, schooled in perspective and media option, we assume our smocks and ring the dais. Some vantages are better than others, the subject's tones prove more vivid when glimpsed from this angle, or this. Then he enters the center, lets fall a robe piped in crimson and eggshell, lays down as one's lover might after a hard day's work. There are the familiar flushes, the long-drawn cones and closed arenas, our stranger subject with finger stilled, mid-strum, on his stomach. Striations, downy arcs, sheens more subtle than marble or petal, surfaces woven of light and agate, ores elastic, oil and water. We reduce him in the first instant of our reckoning, assign the simplest archetypes to his frame. Suggestive waves and ribs to be filled spread over the canvas. Beyond the rudimentary cues, the tilts and pivots most coarsely conveyed, are details, the amateur's test. Whatever is asked of the body is answered, layer by layer; each asserts, in succession, you are closer to my name. No other theme upheld for scrutiny so compels us to touch it, no other image on late afternoons reverberates with the secrets: no love is objective, to realize is love. We might make it an abstract, we are tempted to press the innocence from us because we are falling headfirst into him. His nudity strips us of distance and limit, it serves as the glass for attentive students of spirit and body, the boggling intertwine. Beneath that sensitive fabric fitted to him, beneath the visible film is another, another still, infinite material intimacy tied to the pulse and desire to gaze past the barrier, to where we are pattern, radical enumeration, color and music, history flowering in vaporized crystal and silk. Anonymity unique, always outward flowering and echoing back, interior flux to expression and quicksilver utterance, return, like a gift. And what of the scholar driven to tip his eye into empty air, as does the model? There the palpable mystery, electric, swimming envelopment and network upheld. We are joined inextricably, each of us. To see is to reveal. To render, respond in kind. Second Place Let us bless the shadowed minds who've kept me fed & lit & swift. Hustlers and shorties leapfrogging Satan for a quick dip in forever's fun stye. Nathan, subtle prince, who blew back bullets with a clean heave. Helen in white silk, teaching my vision the cold visions of moon. Osiris, underneath, suturing quilts of frazzled hells so that dogs, worms, birds, awake with saints in the belly! Let us bless Carmen. Her magic dust fanned the hot dreams; Myrtle, never stooping, dancing for weeks to my drowsy whispers; bless her babies, Clem and Kip, soiling fat fingers in Mommy's deep purse. Their love lives, baffles your book. Damnit I choked and they rushed tight hugs; I was naked and they draped hot robes, I was hot and they flapped long towels; I was dead and they floured my bones. I'll bless the hoodlums, clockers, thieves, gave me shelter when my brothers slammed doors; the low-life, pretty sluts conjuring sanctity from junkie sleep. In them, I tremble holy and never blot. In them, my blackest curse is washed in quick fever, lit to a loud and lingering hymn. Third Place I can smell the flavors of your neck in this creel of codfish. You thumbed the fish till its bones crumbled, piece by piece, gills garnished your wrists like ousted confetti. Supper revolved around the pungency of Madras Curry. Somewhere, in the handcrushed garlic or Origello spice, I can taste all the things that you touched today. Honorable Mention that stone isn't big enough, have you seen his followers? Possessed, everyone of them; not a clear eye in the bunch. It's a martyr they'll be looking for, selling bones, blessings, or curses, it was a hasty burial, but that shroud! Smooth as Lydian cloth- expensive. Any leaks and the smell will get you, your food be leaving one way or the other for the dogs, I put attar on my lips camphor keeps away the flies. I hate these people, their vengeful god, another year and I'll see Rome again. I don't even know who to look out for, the priests might come, they have schemes. Take watch tonight, it's their Sabbatum, the Hebrews won't venture far, it's a holy time. I'm experienced, I'll take tomorrow night, though I doubt anything will happen. Honorable Mention It seems So crucial So critical So God awful urgent And then She... Lets you And then She... Gives you Every... Little... Thing... And in that moment Immediately after The only thing In the world That matters Is Art And Poetry Is again The most important And crucial Of things Then After Half an hour The invert sugars In the blood Start to again Feed the brain And slowly But surely All that She has Every... Little... Thing... Starts to again Become Of inordinate And monumental Importance Never Underestimate The Power Of Glucose Inverted Honorable Mention Seemingly endless, this August rain, fashioning rats-tails and the scent of electricity in treacle-humid air. The wipers flail, damp palms finger gearstick with some smiled upon urgency; Interior windows misted. You say you do not care for warm rain; I see a kneeling in ocean scented grass. Thigh inside thigh, rivulets rounding shoulder, growing heavy; slowing, crazing down the switchback of your arm. I do not care for gray myself, prefer the terror of cumulonimbus uncertainty. Touchpaper, flint. Counting the seconds to myself between the flash and the thunder. Honorable Mention Pitons packed, I amble mesas, inch foothills. Altitudes ahead of me earnest Boy Scouts foot it up for merit badges, eagledom -- the easy aeries of the untempted. They're goddam Galahads with ropes and I some footsore Lancelot. My grail? A nap at base camp. A glass of wine with Gwen. Oxygen. Grace from those I, in mastering foe, failed. My grieves are scarred, mail heavy, linked like an imposed ontology I can't grasp yet bear ever up. All seems steep, sheer. Extreme exposure ain't the thrill it used to be -- or is, and I am not the man. So belay me, baby, down I go. Or shall we strip clean, cache our gear for pilgrims to come, fire our faith with fingertips in crevices, end it with a free climb? Honorable Mention The sixth bone she saves for luck; puts it behind her ear and watches the children suck on nectarines. She struck them before, beat them until they bleated like little pigs. Now she cannot help but love them, even when she is hating them, even as they wait for the electricity to be shut off. Her fingers are so nervous, she wants to push her nails into the children's skin and pop them open like bruises, suck out their love and send them away. She has fried the last catfish and laid open the icebox looking for pickles and a few sour cherries. After this, there will be nothing but peanut butter until Thursday, when the check will be divided and divided again; rationed out in coupon-deals and fall-apart-shoes. The sixth bone she saves for luck, flicks the ash on the end of the last menthol slim and wonders what she did to deserve a cold house, tearful babies, and no man in sight. Honorable Mention Only that we had water did we have wooden boats that split the wet whips in gale like a maul on autumn cord, vessels that spread seas with the diesel of winter, fished moon to moon on the turn of the osprey and worn, filled empty basins with the salt of their boards. So we axed one after another - ripped, planed, formed the planks until the pop of a poplar knot bottomed the forest that reflects now in the shine of a fiberglass hull. Honorable Mention I can see what stuff shadows are made of, And how clay can become a kind of light, How I'm like a fish who can't not swim Into a world where the seagrass is swirling When you lift up your arms on a hot day, Feel in you the raw green of a plant Being changed to heat in an oven of blood, What lies not awake, not asleep inside The shell of another day promising All of itself to no pearl expectations, Smell in your animal, the flower My tongue is poet of, the instant its tastes Are lavish enough by creed to taste you. You're the dictionary of my senses un-spelled As kisses, a rote freedom the sky gathers As the feathers of a bird, to spill wind from When its eyes behold, to gather by law What no one else could ever see: scales Of brief rainbows and the world's creation.
October 2001 First Place When she opened her mouth, only a tongue came out. They had expected fire engines, or maggots, or little frogs with hooked teeth. Only a tongue, sadly, and all it did was wiggle around. The stars hung slugged, acting neither cowardly nor special. The gaseous things refused to even blink or shoot because stars don't really do that sort of thing. The dirt didn't suction and swallow pumas or skyscrapers. Everything stood as it should be, indifferent to her perfectly human, though delicious, kisses. This surprised them, and several hands were thrown protectively above heads as though bombs or boulders would drop. But none fell. One woman fainted and the prostration wasn't significant because she soon woke, scraped and muttering ouches. This disturbed the fellows, so they grabbed themselves reassuringly. Yes, still present. Yes, still stiff. But then they remembered that it was only their hands and her tongue, not some catastrophic Gwinevere. The throng cried. It was quite romantic of them (her tongue still milled about), but there were no rivers of tears or hearts pierced with tiny daggers. After the kiss, they said goodnight. Everyone returned to work in the morning. Second Place Bats in the belfry, bats in the belfry. The chant from children I don't see rings outside my window. By night the bat comes back, settles in between screen and pane. I give it a name. Who is the dictator of madness and not? Who deems the incongruent muddled enough? I smile when I ask. I had a wife and children once. Bees fill a hole in my backyard, their sudden home. One day it's safe, the next they swarm. They sting the dog. At dusk I sneak with gasoline, boiling water. Smoke the fuckers out. These are not gentle bumblebees. Night by night I fill the hole. Nothing around it is living. But the bees survive. I stay inside. I listen. The children are back. I press my ear tight against glass. What are they singing? A song for the end of the world. There will be no other. Third Place The ponderous Galapagos turtle lies on his belly, munches greens, contemplates time, how wondrous it seems: When I was a youth did I stand on my feet, arms akimbo? Did I despise my fat parents and the rocks from which they came? Was I a boy preoccupied with copulation? Did I join up to save the nation? Did I develop a sneer? Did I know why I was here? Of course not. Turtles don't go on the road, we enjoy our isle, reproduce in a pile, then eat a lot, or as much as we can get. Kelp's not boring, plenty to do right here without running off. Poor humans with their cameras. And the wheel. And the sail. And fire, of course. They start out stupid and must be tended, rear ends wiped, clothing mended. At twenty, though, they know everything there is to know. Time seems slow on my Galapago. I swim, I think, I have another drink. Thus spake the turtle, beached on his belly. Time has not made him particularly wise and he's become too tough to eat. Honorable Mention Come on up, wanna take a ride with me? Yes you. (I write in a sexy smile) I saw you giving me the eye. (oh my oh my) Am I delighted to have chanced this way today? The afternoon is looking good.... I am in control with young and handsome written in for the duration; imagination is running at breakneck speed (I like it fast). Wrap yourself around me (I write) and hang on tight you are in for the ride of your life. My fingers fly as we round curve after curve laughter reins free as we scream More more more.... But suddenly I am more than aware of your body pressed against mine. (whew it sure is hot in here) Wait where were we going? I seem to have lost track of the road it doesn't seem to matter any more as your hands are roaming curves on their own (I don't remember writing this....) ...the scent of you, right here behind your ear, the taste of your neck pure exquisite. My fingers explore and oh I do adore your lack of attire. her blouse I let fly) I have made my way mi hermosa, to your belt made of snake mmmmm what I would do to you, if you would just apply the brake. ...no wait, hold up... Pull up I tell you, give the keyboard back to me. (when did I say that you could type?) You really can't take me seriously, (I have to be home by 5:00). This is just a poem and we are very near Honorable Mention I cannot say I wasn't touched. I was. Really, I was. My face exploded with my own wet salt With every glimpse of newsprint. Every time the songs broke on the radio, I dreaded the next words, My heart bound in a painful pause, Waiting. I almost tattooed a half-masted flag On my right calf, Just so I'd feel something real, So I'd snap out of the notion That it was all a marathon nightmare, And feel. Really feel. Feel, Like the orphaned child Whose teacher kept him after the evacuation Of schools, waiting for his parents to show. Feel, Like the New Bedford firefighters Who boarded the train to New York the day I left For Texas, On their way to "do their duty". To climb through human rubble, Hoping to find anything, Anything That might make someone smile, Anything that wasn't Teeth and hair and crushed cement girders, Bone and blood and stench. Feel, Like the thousands of families, The thousands of friends Of the thousands of victims. I wanted the pain for them. I wanted to pierce my skin So I could hurt in the name of the people Who didn't have the choice. But just like I didn't go To New York And climb around on bent rafters, Gas mask pressed to my face, Collecting sadness in a giant black plastic bag, Like all of the better men and women who did, Without regard for their lungs or their minds or The possibility of more collapse- I didn't go To the tattoo parlor And sit in the sterile chair in the sterile room With a sterile look on my face and no tears While a strange, multi-colored man Drew a permanent picture on my flesh. I didn't do it Because I didn't have the money, But the people who it would have been for Don't know that. All they know, if they can see me From where they are, Is that I didn't do it. I sat in my safe little house, On my safe little island Where nobody was dying, And the air was not thick with smoke and the odor of human decay, And all of the families were as intact As they had been a week before, And I watched it unfold on television And I did Nothing.
November 2001 First Place Hip-high, the shrugged waters beat and ebb, stopped from retreat by six inches of ice. And you among the dead, pull wounded free of sloes and muck, send breath into the empty shallow bowls. Nurses beg you to fall back as soldiers lift from bank to bank. Your wife dips her thumb into Kvasir's brass mug, says your gray name into the corners of the room where it hangs and echoes back. Verdenal. Verdenal. Mieux vaut tard que jamais. Will she wait in the lobby to forgive your passion or return by boat, blown with the fine dust of grief? Better you should fall by way of Lisbon bulls, by Spanish whores who fawn and fatten on culls of cheese and beads of wine. Better even by the sea with salt crystals in your hair, with sun and his hand upon your back, touching in secret. A cloth goes up between you; but beneath, around and through, the moth-worried yarn gives way to touch. The butterflies have eaten through the blinds, through winter wool, kept habits, wedding shifts and winding cloth. You remember Munich in May, multivoltine swallowtails unfolding from the cherry trees. Pupae whispered distress, caught between bodies. He held your head and cried with southern slur, one vowel into your mouth. In Starnbergersee, a Seneca nun gave daily readings of the bones and wrists, the shapes of souls, bronze whispers of bound spirits. "Don't ask," she said so darkly, as the bones tumbled against rock-tanned sinew. "You vanish both. You are not immortal. Love is an affliction, how the spirit moves in venial recrimination. Give me a dime." On mine-landing your body opens, spread by shrapnel, and a ghost emerges wet onto the battlefield. The red moon is too cold to dry wings, too weak to spread and burn patterns onto limbs. You call a name but he cannot hear. Miles away he sinks down with his poetry. Will he examine every star tonight for the one that you touch too, the one that guides between smoke and flame? Second Place The Julia Set: the interface between escaping and cycling points. Hold the down beat, one; if she unpins her hair, play poker with the axis, two-three; rotate your left heel on Mandelbrot's theory, plot ornaments on a strand, mark how it coils, syncopates four and one in incalculable iterations. Break contrapasso, mirror desire's punishment cycling in infinite variety between two and three. Julia is what every woman is, an imaginary number coming into being somewhere off stage. Third Place 1. Halvah Girl My halvah girl, with sweet apocalypse and almond eyes, wrapped round my kindled soul bids that I savor honey sesame. I call her with my heated kisses and, a taunting mockingbird, she trills. I'm more and less than what you want of me my sugars grown as rich as marzipan. 2. In the Watermelon Pavilion Her lies could fill museums of endless halls, in each a single guide to shade the friction of her wit. Here is the watermelon pavilion, that soothes with shades of green and woman's oils. A helmut carapace shields all that's soft. Run your hand across the servile curves but know The grass is not immune to pissing dogs. 3. Imam Creped in his final black and sipping a horchata, the giant, though friend of labials, posits metaphysical punishments. He shudders to reveal them by transiting electron, fearing that the the FBI confuse his good intentions with mere free speech. Meet him on the street, though, and he'll share his wisdom over a tamal(e) and corona beer; no email would suffice to explicate what dances in his brain, of severance and dentistry reserved for the gangly man who limps, lips farting bogus fatwa. 4. The prom no time to cry hello or say that sky is fallen, the chickens peck out wishing seeds. darkened in their shadows, trees no longer reaching water or for sun, their wood creaks into kindling. lonely moisture rises into steam, dancers swirl through bare ripped gowns that float above unnoted ballrooms, creped gymnasiums. 5. Physics I sit upon the carved stump of what's left of chaos, filled with joy's contempt for meandering complexity, a throne from which eyes can meander, across the plain, out to the horizon where the boats fall off. 6. Two Sarahs Talk to the two girls named Sarah. Tell them you'll take them to Lake Cuomo, even though you know there's no such place except in their romantic minds. Tell them yes of course to their every query you'll find that at least one of them won't mind that you tell them anything to please them, set their waters flowing like waves that press for your saving shore, hugging to your contours, seeking ships of any flag. My heart has always burned to whiter heat but such combustion has made it small. Honorable Mention They are out there I have seen them I see them now in my mind They are all around me like large lazy animals like odalisques lying on their sides in the golden sun My urge is to run to them these wide Sendak hills to embrace them, grinning like a toddler. To remain among them through the hours and the seasons. To become them. Yet I am but a small insect in their swaying grasses And they, with their black and white cows Are forever. Honorable Mention This morning as I made coffee I realised that I can trace my life through coffee. I recall my timid mother serving coffee to my father's grand relations. Even then I sensed her pain as they poured their insincere praise. "May," (she hated being called that) "always makes such first class coffee". The tall white pot's long slender spout spewed forth a pale repulsive liquid made from essence in a bottle. "It's the chicory. That's the secret", said my proud tea-drinking father. I was three but even then I knew unhappiness when I saw it. Coffee-shops swept student life into a caffeine-sodden world where jazz and painting, sex and daring, all required the aid of coffee. Next my Viennese friends taught me, always grind your coffee freshly. Wooden grinder clamped between my knees I calmly turned my prayer wheel's handle. I had joined the chosen few who always ground fresh beans. Blue Mountain beans were cheaper then so long ago in quiet New Zealand. In London where decent coffee never reached outside of Soho. Our electric grinder whizzed our morning brew of desperation. My Italian friend instructed me in how to order coffee. "Un buon caffè, proprio un buon caffè" I never dared insult the man behind the coffee bar, I trusted him to make a fragrant frothy concentrated brew. Her angry accusation seemed to me a mark of deep mistrust. I found these men were proud of what they did and never needed threats. Now in Sydney, morning silence makes me use a vacuum pack of arabica fine-ground coffee. Grinders spoil my meditation. Birds and coffee are my morning. Little sealed packs in the freezer, taste the same and leave me silence. Outside metal grinds on metal, as the world impacts and hammers threatens and erodes its surface. Morning coffee with the birds and sunshine makes me think of days when mother's insecurity was emphasised by gimlet eyes of condescending relatives and now I understand and love. Honorable Mention We blow smoke signals across your rusty Delta 88 in exhaled tokes of winter air. Frost fingers creep up my bare legs and crystallize curls wet with morning sweat. Smells of slung hash leak from the chrome diner. My coat echoes caresses as I sashay past regulars on silver swivel stools. Smudged mascara and puffy lips - a jukebox mocks, swallows my two-bits for an Elvis serenade. We thaw with gulps of French toast and steam over chipped mugs. Trapped in my trench coat, tributaries of sweat join in rivers between my breasts, pool my belly button only to spill over in a rush to join musky reminders of you; your x-ray leer adds the burn to my cheeks. It seemed the thing to do, darling, wanting to stay clothed in little but you. Take me home, please, peel me from my wrapper. Lay me back in tangled sheets surely cool now in our absence.
December 2001 First Place Years of storm have receded. Violence ebbs. A shoal of bones, heaped up in driftwood tangles, lies with the heft and density of clubs, in hexagons and accidental angles. A swell of pelvis rises as a wave stilled in its cresting. Ribs bow up, brown staves. Fastidious birds pick through the surface tier of knob and shank and curve. Dark scorpions, waxy and pliant, sidle and disappear into this wilderness of skeletons, of knurled bone-ends porous with honeycomb, small cells filled with detritus, blood and loam. A child picks up an object from the dirt, examines it, ignorant of its causes, drops it back to the earth. It lies inert. The ground grows human teeth, and no one pauses to mourn these scattered anonymities. Starlings twitter and squeak in the arid trees. Skulls brood in their pyramid. Owlish, white, some rest at an angle. All have eggshell cracks. They stare into themselves, reliving the sight of the hatchet, baseball bat, steel pickax. Hollow fruit of the grave, they lie revealed, stolid as geodes broken in the field. These silent ones, exhumed from the teeming ground, insistent, blind and dumb as the seasons' turning, whisper of dust, and the earth's relentless round. But they will be heard again, urgent and burning with what they have seen. Like chattering birds they come, full of their secrets, out of the hecatomb. Second Place We met just once, an evening on the Swan above the rowing club, and spoke of art, and poetry; I'd like to say we watched the river run in silent circles smooth as glass across the far light speckled surface of Perth Water-I'd like to say we saw the stars as burning suns that fed on poems, but we said nothing of the night, the place, the river; just talked of art, the joy and pain of sonnets-- and bouquets that bear the burden of a life, a thousand thousand times more complex than a poem. Third Place In this house we talk and cry hammer out what we need to discover stumble in from green hospital walls try to sleep at odd hours learn about the Shadow. A cliché -- "the Shadow of Death." Here's the rub... It is here. I need something to tide me over drugs, sex, prayers, alcohol today moves slow as the doctors deliberate. You waver on your pillows. Your eyes are looking off at some ocean. If you leave, there will be serious problems. I stand beside you, a Job's comforter where there are no helpful answers where any action is unsatisfactory where no body, however young, is immune. Beside you in the night terrors and grinding weariness of even bothering to get through a day. In the chill promise of mortality numbing promise of sooner than later Casting, grasping at straws; chiropractic, shamanism, holism, tinctures, astrological influences, Eastern breathing scorned by doctors with nothing better to offer, contradictory with veiled, noncommittal eyes Watching dismayed as the pounds, needed muscle and fat shrink to recent memory. I clean your hair from the shower drain every day. Beside you in silent solitary illuminations; truths unanswerably implacable, blinding, indifferent, terrifying, beautiful, supernatural, hopeless. Let's make fists of divine unfairness, raised shaking at nothing in particular, invoking unknown spirits falling impotent and trembling I'm beside you in confusion, weariness, and fear as only a father can descend with a son. Let me unflinching burn these memories within. I will still try and teach you to dance. Honorable Mention Down on Tucker Street, the Missouri Club rules Sunday night Girls, night out for the whores along Jefferson and Grand Fills the sleepless hours for alcoholic Teamsters and waiters With jazz and blues, and escape the loneliness at the bottom And we play the old stuff, old school, music cut on the yellow teeth Of the Mississippi delta, cold and muddy as the waters Flowing south along the blues highway from Chicago to New Orleans The silt of wreck and ruin spilled across its checkered floor Once upon a time this Mobar was America, all dolled up In stream-lined silver and streaming neon eyeliner Where plates filled with burgers and meatloaf were served up By beautiful young faces in shiny, white skirts and blouses Everyone liked Ike, and Ike liked them, even if his last name Was Turner and not Eisenhower, her name Tina, not Mamie And the music bubbled over like the greens simmering in bacon grease Music, re-inventing itself with every bent note, every strained chord Take back the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and this sand bar Might still be the most regal queen this side of the river But the years have been cruel to her, and even the cheap makeup They hoist upon her, cannot hide the ugly truth, that she has cancer And yet inside, we play like mad Scotsmen, with kilts ablaze Wind up the saxophone, straighten out the trumpets Let loose the Tower of Power on a city hungry for the blues Hungry for the guitar, hungry for the wail of the harp Hungry to feel alive, to be a part of what seems so far away To feel love, a woman, a man dancing in your arms The longing for touch so deeply embedded in the heart and soul That there is little rope left to climb back, to escape Only in a song can such magic take shape, only the notes Falling like spiral stairs before them, beckoning them back To the feelings of life outside the excess and consumption Break the rocky surface, if only momentarily, and breathe deep Sharecroppers and slaves have been replaced By cabdrivers and office workers in chains of complacency And they sit around our bonfire, take warmth in the flames That the music offers them on chilly November night Until, all that is left is the ambers of morning Another day to face the grinding poverty and addiction Another day to sleep alone with no thought of tomorrow Only of so many yesterdays, come and gone Come and gone, like the Old Man in his bank Come and gone, like first love, first hate Come and gone, like the chance to make it in this life Come and gone, like the luck squandered when needed the most Down on Tucker Street, the Missouri Club sleeps quietly Monday morning Her breath wheezing, she hacks from too much cigarette smoke Fills the sleepless hours with something better than loneliness and despair Jazz and blues, painted colors in the corners of the dead, who will sleep Until tomorrow night. Honorable Mention "Use it in a sentence." What? Use what in a sentence? "Hirsel." "She took hirsel(f) too seriously." If this was a test I would pass it my way. But what I really wanted to do was drop kick him into tomorrow. "No, hirsel," he said again as if it were the reprise of his favorite hymn, "meaning to arrange in flocks." I thought of tiny morsels on a plate little bits of cheese and cracker crumbs moving them around, herding, no hirseling them. Of course, I didn't say it aloud. I imagined the inside of his head as a great cavern, not entirely empty but with a few jewels embedded on the bottom lovely diamonds if you could only pry them loose. He was still waiting, tapping on the desk, waiting. I began slowly, weighing every word. "At night she went to sleep by counting sheep, starting at 100 and counting backward but never reaching zero." I asked if a paragraph would be okay and when he nodded grimly, I continued. "When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed the dream of the faithless. Sheep wandering off on their own, tripping over rocks, tumbling from cliffs, alas," Oh no, he's rolling his eyes now, I shouldn't have said alas. "there was no Good Shepherd there for hirseling." |
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