Winning Poems for July 2007
Judge Maurya Simon

His Jacket
by Witt Wittman
SplashHall

Early mornings when the whippoorwills
have hushed their racket,
you stoop in the garden, pulling weeds,
always in your tan jacket,
checkerboarded with cigarette burns,
the pockets slick with grime
from years of nesting collected eggs,
the frayed knitted cuffs
hang like dried tassels on ready corn.

I was afraid if I washed it,
it would fall into shreds
and disappear down the drain,
to find a home with all your
lost dress socks,
(no matter; you never wore
anything but boot socks anyway).

Arms loaded with squash
and knotty tomatoes,
pockets filled with chicken eggs--
never eggplant,
you tossed that jacket on the
same ear of the same kitchen chair
for so many years that it is worn down
and shorter than the others.

I should throw the nasty thing away,
but your ruggedness still clings.
I need to wrap myself in it
like a photographer
under the black drape,
perhaps to capture you
one more spring,
stooping in your garden.


The Man Next Door According to His Pockets
by Adam Elgar 
Writer's Block

He's losing faith in us.
We feel him check and re-
check that we have his keys
and wallet, and the talismanic
letter from his daughter,
wherever she may be.

He slouches down the same
streets to the same work,
mistrust a whisper that aspires
to clamour. Which of us
is guilty of the hole
that everything slips through?

Some conjuror has swapped
his life for one where wives'
eyes redden and accuse,
obsessed sons slur and darken,
daughters abandon him
for intolerable lovers.

Our forebears knew his children
when they were little more
than half our height, those soft
fists reaching up to tug out treasures,
his reward to let his pockets
haemorrhage for those he loved.  


During an Epileptic Fit, Ida Saxton McKinley
has a Premonition of her Husband's Assassination
by Ellen Kombiyil 
Blueline

Just now I have seen it, fluttering, 
William's handkerchief, sailing towards my face 
to conceal my expression -- (Oh, I know 
what I must look like, my rolling eyes, my spit) -- 
But it couldn't have been -- William has gone 
to the Exhibition. The white handkerchief 
wasn't his at all; it was rimmed with blue lilies. 
Goodbye, it said, a ghost hand waving 
from the bow of a ship. That sound! 
A horn-blast, a shot from a gun, 
an air-organ's fanfare: Bach's concerto 
had begun. The moment was eternal, 
the handkerchief falling, falling, never 
landing, on fire and floating as it fell, 
the flap of doves. Be quick! Send word --
he has gone to the Reception. I fear 
the President has set sail for the far shore 
and we shall find him already fallen.  


Insatiable
by Laurel K Dodge 
MiPo

The mackerel are as charred and flat
as the tomatoes are red and round.

There is magic in random numbers,
a message in the three dead fish

and the five fruit, ripe and grotesque.
A trinity of skeletons, and an uneven

yield, a harvest that keeps everything
off balance. The green tomato waiting

on the sill will not make a whole.
Even if you put a hand clear through,

you would not believe you'd seen the holy
ghost. Fork and knife suspended above

the heaping plateful of food; your belly
growls, but you cannot move. Later,

you'll remember how the eyes stared
at you like god. How, in the distance,

the apocalypse burned. This is how
Lot's wife felt just before she turned

around. Soles too blistered, too tired
to move the body forward. And a hunger

despite the plenty; an empty stomach,
a bereft vessel. A hole that could not be filled. 


Cherry Grove
by Elodie Ackerman
The Writer's Circle

All around the old place,
the dead visit. The
day he opened up the trunk
of that sweetgum tree,
and before we saw the
horseshoe hanging inside,
something brushed against
my face. I heard a nickering
far away, and the smell of oiled
leather and candlewax.

A few days later Lloyd
found an anvil half
inside an oak tree, back
by the old barn. It was ten
feet off the ground, and
the color of storm clouds
when the air smells like metal
and electricity breaks
it right in two. They say
a shipwright lived
there once. I know.
I've heard him hammering. 

That was before the rumor
of the slave revolt across
the road. Nineteen men killed,
tortured, all for the sake
of a child's tale. A child
named Obey. No excuses.

The crape myrtle we cleared from
the back forty bled claret-
colored sap, and stuck inside
one old, stubborn knot
was a skeleton key.

The silver lying all around,
tarnished forks and bone-
china plates. Daddy said
she burned that house a'purpose,
took the tram to the train
and left town. Nobody
Ever saw her again.
But to be frank, I don't
believe it.

I saw her walking in the fog
one morning, early. Picking bones,
rearranging bricks,
breaking twigs over and over.
She saw me too.
We've been talking
back and forth, she and I,
between the branches.


Haul
by Brandon
The Maelstrom

The last brown box and bulging plastic bag's 
been thrown inside the truck. A vacuum screams 
through empty rooms while morning dawns and drags.

The past is bundled up, we'll follow dreams 
of wealth and newness in another town, 
a neighborhood with winding streets, shade trees 
and parks. Escape's the road we're driving down, 
scrambling to find those blasted keys 
and turn the locks. Before the front door shuts 
for good, a glance around the house reveals 
familiar ways and that our lives had ruts:

the dingy pathways on the carpet show 
high-traffic routes, that we just spin our wheels, 
because we're there no matter where we go.


Sparrow
by Bernard Henrie
Writer's Block

6:30. The radio just lighting up. November
in corridors, faint yellow bulbs turning on.

Men take down their trousers, lazy at last;
butter placed on the table, fresh meat cut
on heavy bread, almost eaten.

Utensils burnt underneath with electric heat,
men beside dishes in the sink, women released
from shops asleep on davenports, a soiled potato
in a pail; once vivid folds of hair pinned back.

There are men who look out between the blinds
and darken as the light falls dark, grow still
in rooms that grow quieter still.

Not morning time, not afternoon, time written
down but not addressed, thin painted palm trees
on fields of long faded green, a souvenir cup
holding a tooth brush, a cloth your scent;
lumps of hydrogen stars, clouds of meteor gas
and fumes of futile ascent.

I have held a mask across my face,
stayed alone longer than I should want,
become fossil bone and broken shell.
Almost partners with the migratory birds
fallen on thermal air and comic suspense. 

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