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 Winning Poems from 2002 January • February • March
January 2002 First Place It is the blood I remember, not of the living or the dead but of the ones who wait in the freezer like old men grown tired of their skin. My father removes their coats and they stand whole, perfect. All that is heavy falls to me. I hold the bucket balanced on a knee. A knee made bone, the same bone which cries under my father's knife. Heart, liver, four stomachs from a cow. I carry and dump in the barrel held for the dogs who are hungry, who come in the night with women, scarves pulled over their heads. Ones who rummage and beg but do not speak. It is all here. What I carry. All that I need to piece together a great beast. One perfect, drained of all that stains my father red and I can ride her, my creation, to a place where little girls lie in their own sheets, clean and unafraid. Second Place Sleek fist-eared hounds paddle home along the shore. They bay from the bank, like horns through silvered slow ash and fall-down basswood I cant their names as a ritual of protection; row out for oysters, cut clinging kelp from dark-eyed stones. I deny that there is ice or even the memory of ice, but my hands are blue, stung by small stars. The dogs shake free of wet, their deep-earth scent thick as acorns and red leaves. They lie down near the fire, swim across a dream where the sea never ends. Third Place Love, the crack in the wall grew some last night. Don’t call. I won’t answer. I’m yellow as this legal pad. How did Miss P. take death’s dip? Not fast food and doughnuts. Poor heart, race. Pill bottles rattle in the cupboard, echo empty verse. Sugar, your placebo ran out just before you did. I doctor myself. Just me and a house that needs a pump. I roll my sleeves, pray. If I had nerve I’d drive the highway, do the big swerve. But there are doors to go through. Steps. It can wait. Come see me. Bring wine, red and cheap. Honorable Mention Within the harbor’s stilting light, there are two girls within sight of The Veritas Maid, gone a day and full within her quarter hold, of bluefin. There are two girls above the Hampshire crags, the froth and fray below. Above a swath of Pluto’s retching, there are two girls above the violent hissing roar, waves defining waters. Against horizon shorn, are flowers. There are two girls against hard-light disguised as gyre gulls, in shadow. Against a gale raveling cold unfurl, there are two girls beyond fires’ breach, mutely standing: Leucosia, Ligia. Beyond seaway passage, in reach of lightning’s fold beyond claim, there are two girls. There are two Honorable Mention My son tells me he sees heaven in his heart and Christ knows I want to tell him it's true, he's right, but I'm tired, weary, and I think forgive me, I think just for one moment I think, sure kid here's a quarter, hop a bus see how far heaven takes you, and I picture him, my four-year-old climbing those big rubber bus stairs with the grooves so he won't slip if it's wet, see him reach, slide his coin through the slot as the driver, his mouth rounding o's, says sit down while raising his eyes, whites rolling up the rearview mirror as my boy walks the aisle, passengers' mouths opening closing, landed fish, hooks and eyes, the old women, orange lipstick outside the lines scaring him as he passes with no breadcrumbs so steady, my son, so steady as he finds a seat, clambers up, sits so straight and tall and alone except for his heaven, his blessing before his mama breaks his heart, shoos heaven like she does a monster from his room, shoos heaven out the window to some other child safe and warm in the house he was born in, his parents' steady breathing from the bedroom, breadcrumbs in the night, heaven in his heart.
February 2002 First Place I expected something like snow, perhaps-- soft flakes lulled slowly aloft to float, crystalline, and light soundless among the dead and the living, settle tender atop the silver, leafy laurels and shimmering branches of the birch, its curling winter coat clutching delicate-cold to the edge of the rocky ridge. I knew there would be no moisture, nothing wet to hold anything together. Logic told me that. Still, somehow I expected snow-- a brilliant blanket. But just as the heavy lid lifted, wind's bitter roar dipped and drew you-- powdery, grey-- to disappear above my gasp and high into the great gap of the Red River Gorge. Second Place She used to be Viola, farmbred, cornfed daughter of dirt. Baby fat blonde jumped the nowhere bus with a bootlace flapping, gritty chapstick in her pocket and pasteurized milk in her daddy's scotch thermos. Fate est. 1977, she walked away on rooted feet and now she shakes a disillusioned ass at a southbeach titty palace called the Maraschino Cherry, screaming red walls hung full of glaring Warhol and Dali blacklights, polite bouncers in business suits. The clientele speaks of Paris, of summers spent at Archipalego de Colon in knowing voices. It brags like a regular Studio 54, but it's just another downtown hard bar, with the same coke zombies and drag queen disciples all licking Kismet off squares of colored cellophane, thier faces pulled in grotesque passion. The stage pops and snaps with faulty neon, the constant crackle on charged air makes her think of the spark chamber she saw once at a county science fair, when she was still Viola, baby fat blonde the crowds called Sapphire, because it was spelled out behind her on a black velvet backdrop in sputtering tubes of violent blue. It spits static at her bare back, bites at her skin with electric teeth, drawing sweat that smells of blood and friction. She sways, seductive on rooted feet, runs a dry tongue over nervous lips and thinks of chapstick, of warm milk in a plaid thermos. Third Place The first time you say the word "fuck" in front of your family, your sister's pushing garden peas beneath her mashed potatoes, the Methodist church down the street rings six o'clock, and your mother asks, "Did you change the grade on your report card?" That's when your mouth opens and the word just happens -- you say, "Why the fuck...?" And time slows down; stretching out so you can see -- in perfect, slow motion, Six-Million-Dollar-Man detail -- your mother's back stiffen, and the weary disappointment your dad's been distilling in his eyes for the past two or three lifetimes. And in some useless part of your mind, you wonder if Einstein included the "fuck" factor in his Theory of Relativity -- how time tends to slow down around black holes, women who ask, "How do you really feel about me?" after sex, and tenth graders who say the word "fuck" in front of their mothers after forging fraudulent report card grades. Somehow your mind can't resist taking advantage of the temporary time warp, tracing the carbon of the moment into your memory the way you traced over your algebra grade -- dividing and rounding the D's hump into a respectable B. And suddenly you have the urge to grab your sister's lump of pea ridden potatoes, slap it on your back, climb to the top of the Methodist church, and ring the bells, ring the fucking bells until time loses interest and passes you by. Honorable Mention We had the rains that washed away winter. Now, mid-January, cherry blossoms brighten the eyes, of the woman in the title company who visited Japan and knows what they mean; blue sky gladdens the heart of the waiter in the Thai restaurant next door to the title company; and at home, plum tree, quickening. Honorable Mention The butter was never sweet It tasted of salt I remember the smell It was sour and seemed to gather in pockets, so that as I walked from one room to another, I was sometimes overwhelmed by it The day they killed the pig I lay on the kitchen floor, feeling ill and watching her hands She sang in gaelic about the winds and the cliffs on the west coast Her hands had no music in them They slapped and slipped through the bowl squeezing the curds "Sugar Nanna?" I asked "Will you put sugar in?" She gazed at me "You don't need sugar in butter child" My father called her The Last Drop Never happy till she used the last drop I watched him stare gloomily into his bottle "The last drop" he said "is always the saddest one" "Never waste anything" she told me "you'll never enjoy things if you waste them" In the afternoon heat It seemed the only thing that moved was Nanna She was the bustle in a house of silence And when I think back She is the only image that remains She is the chimney, the northern wall The last thing standing When life crumbled I would ask her if I could If you enjoy something Nanna, is it ever wasted? Honorable Mention i Pearl sky purples above dark rocks as rain arrives to drench the beach. Shadow now where sun was. A scene- change for melodrama, with lights, thunder, and rushing figures. ii Addicted swimmers linger in hissing waves as they greet the deluge. Even Venus loafs in warm sea, careless of wetness where elements merge, her loose red hair dank seaweed-green. iii Tall, bellied grandfather, stork-legged, frets by the ocean edge, afidget at children who stay in amniotic security, more known than remembered. He half recalls sliding in waters. iv Sad fat man in black, soaked no longer by sun, slowly rises from the sand, and squelches, bubbling in thongs, for solitary beer and fish. Always another way to flee melancholy. v Sea and clouds latticed with light subtly surpass public fireworks but unsung, play to an empty house. Stray worshippers applaud silently, and smile recognition without words. Nothing much has happened here apart from things that matter.
March 2002 First Place . . . 80 years gone, and still they die like cattle, their bodies buried under lounge-room floors, their voices lost, like ours, in endless prattle, their deaths a bland accounting, keeping scores. We've made them warriors for the viewing day, bit players in our thirty second wars, a caste of extras, used, already paid, the unseen dead, obedient to our laws. we see their lives as short sharp stabs of light too brief to read what's written on the walls then flick to where some learned late night panel explains and blames and leaves them to their plight: their children starve until the starving palls and we turn over to another channel. Second Place Lay me flat, naked, belly-up on a stainless-steel table. Remove my watch, jewelry, place them in a rubber box. Now raise my head by placing a wooden block beneath my head. Take the surgeon’s stryker saw, be careful not to cut your fingers as ear to ear you make a scalp incision. Get hammer and chisel, tap, tap, tap around the skull, pull my cap. Gently take out my brain, examine it for lesions, bruises, all the thoughts I carried of you. Somewhere hidden is a snowy Vermont, hemlock and spruce, a honeymoon on skis. Log your findings, move on to my eyes, examine them closely in their sockets, or take them out. Dulled to no reflection, still they stare only in your direction. Open my mouth and look at my tongue- Can you remember its truths, its lies? The many, many times it wet your skin? Keep going because I can no longer speak. Pick up a clean scalpel, begin with an incision of the left shoulder, descend, pass under the nipples and ascend to the right shoulder. Pull the cutanous piece upward and back, now make a medium incision from the margin of the previous cut down to the pubic region. Cut through muscle, expose my ribs, ignore my body’s shaking as you separate bone, plunge your hands into my thoracic cavity where you gather my heart. Press your fingertips on its four chambers, each a house of love and anger, remorse, inexhaustible desire until now when all the livid blood is stilled. Record some notes, move quietly down the abdomen, touch the flaccid penis, the shriveled testicles. Recall our daring energies when we were young, slow murmurs of pleasure, our children. Now wipe your forehead and ask yourself, is such dissection still the man you love? If so, piece me together, stitch me tight, take me home, put this thing to rest. Third Place (Co-Winner) Aunt Edith, up from DC, where she burns dollar bills for the Treasury Department, took me out for a walk. Everyone knew and commented on the fact, she had once slept with Lou Gehrig. That's what made Aunt Edith famous, she'd slept with Lou Gehrig. I wish I could sleep with Lou Gehrig, just Lou and me, lying down in bed, having a nice nap after filling up on hotdogs with chopped onions and catsup. Aunt Edith held my hand, we walked down the street, all the kids were watching us, they must have known, Aunt Edith slept with Lou Gehrig. Down the street to Ajay's new barroom, it was brand new with white tile walls. We sat up at the bar; Aunt Edith bought me a Coke while she had a nice big glass of beer. I was sitting next to Mr. Wallace, I told him "This is my Aunt Edith, she once slept with Lou Gehrig." Mr. Wallace, he says real loud, "Hey, did ya hear that, Bobby's Aunt once slept with Lou Gehrig." Aunt Edith pushes the hair off her face, blushes a little bit and smiles; while the men gather around, want to buy Aunt Edith another beer. They all forget about me, I just sit there with my empty Coke glass and wish I had slept with Lou Gehrig, then they would pay attention to me too, not just Aunt Edith. After awhile Aunt Edith is talking loud and the men they're laughing, they're having fun and laughing, but I'm not, I'm tired of sitting there, staring at my empty Coke glass, wishing I had slept with Lou Gehrig, then I could talk loud and have fun too. I pull at Aunt Edith's dress, tell her I want to go home, it's getting real late and I'm sleepy, I don't want to stay in the bar all night I don't want to sleep in the bar tonight. We get up and leave, Aunt Edith isn't walking straight, and I have to take care of her, make sure she knows the way home. On the way home, Aunt Edith stops at a store, a store where they're selling flowers; she buys herself a bouquet of flowers, holds them tight, and says she likes flowers. Third Place (Co-Winner) I The Boy, Theron Banforth, Becoming a Poet--Before the Nettles of Fame Took Hold of Him, Causing Irritation At sixteen, he wrote a verse his teacher praised and told him he had the makings of a real poet. Being young, and a badass to boot, he told himself she wanted his body and, poet or no poet, he'd make her writhe and climb the headboard of the bed until she came seven ways from Sunday. That was a laugh. Nothing happened. Finally his common sense prevailed, and he got the message. She wanted nothing but to nudge his schoolboy's talent--and made it clear she expected a verse on her desk every morning. Without quite knowing why, he delivered. She read whatever he turned in, first thing, and her face fairly blossomed with a new statement over what he'd done, because of her prodding, up in his attic room the night before. He thought all his effort hardly worth the bother now that he'd decided her motive was as pure as a nun's or a crippled wren's. All her intensity was entirely for the verses that he brought her. Not long before that school year ended, she built a fire--not in his cock, where he had enough to do him with the town girls hanging around (just as years before they'd done to Jimmy Dean), but in his brain where words became obsession and writing poems became as indispensable to him as fucking. Inordinately cocky at seventeen, fancying himself a wunderkind, a rustic sage, he knew that any day might be the one when he'd outdistance Frost and Stevens, put Millay's "What lips my lips have kissed" to shame, though she'd gone on her back all the way to Mount Parnassus and come back with a bucketful of poems you could wind your watch by. Never mind that she was a fiery libertine. She wrote like a woman possessed, and he was a little in love with her, though she was dead. The whole lot of them--famous poets everyone, looking serene, austere, immensely wise--swarmed through the pages of his American lit book. How did such people, some of them inclined to be jolly rogues in private, manage their epiphanies, intuit the final word on forever things, and get it down in sensible nouns and verbs? And what of love? Could such as they sustain it-- and not only sustain it, but get it right, now that Archibald MacLeish--the one whose head was always screwed on straight--had taken leave? (The boy thought "Epistle to be Left in the Earth" was the pulsebeat of the universe, set to a transcendent music that only dead poets, possessing such language, could hope to master.) So only in his twenties, armed with the M. F. A. and his new Ph.D., self-congratulatory, obnoxiously full of himself, he meant to rescue modern poetry from its foes, restore it to its rightful mind, and prove that old men, careening out of control toward an ill-humored dotage, were not necessarily best equipped to write it. II The Poet the Boy, Theron Haskell Banforth, Has Become-- Disenchanted, Disconsolate As He Approaches Middle Age Keats he is not. Never was. Never will be. But he's come a long way from that shut-down school in a one-horse town he detested during most of his boyhood The virginal teacher who inspired his zeal for poetry, and thought she was doing him a favor, has long been retired--a grandmother now of eleven. He strides around, spiffy in his tweeds, and pontificates-- lectures flamboyantly on poetry to would-be poets at his classy college, publishes his own acerbic verse in all the biggies: Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Shenandoah and the famed Reviews, Georgia, New England, and gets in Poetry with much-to-be-admired regularity-- not to mention his well-received collections, all still in print, some still selling now and then on Amazon.com. In certain circles, his name is being bruited about as a natural to be the country's poet laureate when Collins's jig is over. Put succinctly, he's made it big, and he knows it. So the fakery begins. He tries to come across as modest, even self-effacing. But some know how he bristled, ranted privately behind closed doors, and got falling-down drunk when the fellowship he'd had his heart set on went to another poet--whose first collection of cliches the powers that be mistook for poems had just come out. He was embarrassed, irate, and went around surly and sad. Self-pity seized him in places more tender than the one beneath his foreskin. He would not be consoled. The fellowship would have validated his entire career, he thought. taken him out of the classroom for a year, ensconced him in the Mediterranean's pavilions of fernfell and exotica. And now he's stuck. He reads the dreadful poems his students proudly hand him every morning (How he despises them!), does endless lesson plans, chairs meetings with boring colleagues, abhors their whiny peevishness, their airs, their childish put-downs. Truth is, he sees himself becoming like them, and hates himself--and his poetry to boot. Having been divorced three times already, he eats out alone, goes home to an empty house alone, downs Scotch on the rocks alone and, before passing out, bemoans the one noteworthy poem he knows he cannot write--and go on living. III The Poet, T. Haskell Banforth, Past Middle Age, Full of Rage, Sharpens His Claws, Prepares To Do Battle, But Falters and Falls Back It's true. He's accused of being tendentious, and he does not deny it. Biased only in favor of broad-mindedness, he does not suffer those who are fools by choice in any shape or fashion. No one but a day-old child can claim that privilege with impunity. To others, it's decidedly off-limits, save for those afflicted in the mind who cannot be responsible--those "pieces of God," as they are called in certain quarters. As a boy, he gave no thought to such matters. Boys don't. Boys seize their fun where they can find it. Girls too, or so he supposes. It's a perk bestowed on youth. But adulthood doesn't fool around; it changes the playing field. One is, from that day forward, obliged to honor the mind's white fire, and those who live in the kingdom of the sane (presuming any do) ought to know not to crawl in bed with every fallacy the human mind's conceived of in its more inglorious moments: the one that's peopled with angels (mere figments of one's imaginings) and the ones that flower darkly into orgasm, however one achieves it, only to conclude that the quirky posture of sex is hideous, pathetic, and incredibly funny-- the body's getting back at the brain to make the cosmos snicker, then guffaw obscenely. In his indiscretions, he's heard it-- much to his embarrassment and repulsion; he'd rather not remember his horny youth in that jerk-off, jerkwater town he came from. His poems have floated his boat to a stagnant backwater of regret. He's made his home in a tree house of thought, an aerie of the mind. He's looked down too long, hating what he saw beneath him. Now he quotes Robert Frost--"Birches" and "The Road Not Taken." He wishes he had written them. Frost lodged them where, to everyone, they are most accessible, but can't be soiled by human touch or lost to convolutions: circumstances threading the needle of time. He'd rather grab hold of the tail of Comet Halley than to write the first words of a poem. The ride at breakneck speed through outer space would likely be less frightening than going into the dark woods of himself where the real dragons live. And that's what writing a poem amounts to: sizing up his soul. It's the only way of knowing who he is; not an easy thing, manifestly most unpretty: a gallery of gargoyles he's already been through, a gun-shy searcher in spectral places, roaming among those phantoms from earlier years when guilt became the diet he ate and grew lean on by the hour. Poor guy who, many a time, wrote a poem rather than kill himself, though it hurt him more. When, he wonders, did he become as "bitter as Bierce" or quinine? When did his poetry become a bane, turn him into such a malcontent? He cannot know for sure. He can hope only that his talent is tempered by some leftover sense of honor, though he doubts it. Snared in a cat's cradle of words-- both caressed and cursed by what they mean-- he's had no choice: poetry's been his lifelong, adversarial god. Honorable Mention "What a man," my aunt says as she shoves a glossy image into my lap. "Listen to my Kris sing," and I do as he smiles up at me like a father or a lost savior dressed in beard and sandals. At thirteen, my legs are white, cold; I fill a chair my aunt has nailed to the middle of the kitchen floor. The linoleum cracks, fades under her photos of bee-hives, waves. I notice this and the smell of hair caught in an iron. My smell on the back of her hand. This is the summer she'll make a red satin dress for the school play; the summer I will lie and say yes, my mother made it. Between voices and demons, she took needle, thread -- thought of me. Later, my aunt will disappear after what grandmother calls an embarrassment of charging my uncle with rape. "Imagine," grandmother will say and I do while everyone sits at the table covers the hole left by the chair. A hole small enough for a girl to fall through and she does to the boy who waits after the play, kisses the side of her neck. Removes the red strap without music or words, just his hands resting on her back in shape of a cross. Honorable Mention The one in the nightgown... In the little room, beyond her childhood¹s sleep, Xhilda daubs on perfume, her senses loosening before she loosens hair and legs to the next gentleman at the door. the one descending stairs toward you, or the one constantly ascending in your mind becoming the highest thought, The young girl plucks a date from the date palm, rubs it on her thigh, cuts it up and gives him half. I want to show you something, she says, and cracks the seed open with her teeth. Look, she says, pointing at the insides, did you know such seeds hide tiny forks and knives? the one who can reach you in your childhood with a kiss, At the foot of a mountain, surrounded by olive branches, a woman recalls oil baths and the slippery spheres of his tongue when the space beneath her fingernails drowns in green-black each time she picks from the olive tree. the woman in the doorway barefoot, or on the couch reading, She leans over the crib to watch her child sleep, then turning to hear her husband snore in their bed, comes out of the bedroom and without turning on the light touches her baby¹s clothes on the couch and knows what her house holds. the one leaning over the balcony to throw you a scarf some winter morning when you leave for work, They turn over their coffee cups to drain on the newspaper, and minutes later glance inside them as if gods looking down on life. Oh Monda, one cries, you have a coffin in the family, watching the other¹s face shrink while today¹s news drowns in coffee silt. the one writing in the dark, After a bath, a young woman checks herself in the mirror. She has lost some weight. Yes, she smiles. On her left thigh, up at the hip, she notices three or four shiny little stretch marks. Oh, she thinks, looks just like a touch from a fairy¹s hand! the slap from a woman¹s hand, from the one who can smell herself on her fingertips, the fingers you may not see smothering you, She cries silently as she prays, like a baby forgotten in despair, cries in her deathbed palms clasped like a fly, clasped and waiting for one more upend of her life in God¹s hands. the one right here The cripple, on her bed, remains the ballerina of her past. She lifts her arms in the dark, mutters a little song and the arms dance all night like evergreens in the wind. and the one not there when you turn At the funeral of her eleven year old son, the mother freezes, like Lot¹s wife, in and out of time, cannot cry when they lower the coffin in the dark, only scratches her hands. It's her flesh that cries. is the woman gliding under every woman you will love. Honorable Mention Lynched men hang sepia on silver lithograph; bodies long and sweet in the stillness of a frame, words ripped out by the seams, documented in a footnote. Take this postcard instead of a name. In a beautiful poplar county, a man dangles from a slow-flower tree while the sheriff poses, hyena smile on gelatin print. Pencil inscription on the reverse reads please visit soon. Bare thighs make me think of stoats, weasels slick with sunlight, mink near the ground, flush with brown apples and milkweed. He is the last dead branch of the tree that holds him, vanishing into the dark of spring-damp almond bark. A shutter drops black cloth over the scene; the small round aperture blinks on without rhythm, cracks on knotted wrists, scored spine and knees. Do not pity me, he whispers through the shadow of long arms. Honorable Mention Evenings, after cookfires dim and the chatter of children subsides within the silence of a conch shell, she picks her way through salt hay to a cliff's edge, draws a bow made from her hair, plays violin to the sea. Chin crushed to rosewood, face gentled by a wash of light from the beam, her fingers fumble then find their rhythm as when spindling a shuttlecock. Behind her, the laundry line signals semaphore to nothing; sails furl and slacken on the horizon, salt spume prickles her bare ankles and she is loosed for a time from her tether to the man in the wingback tamping the throat of his meerschaum with a yellowed thumb, eyes the color of smoke and theft. Honorable Mention We are out of bread, soup and tea now. My little sparrows, perched on tenuous twigs, still hope. Their faces bloom with too many bones, and eyes implore what is a mother for but to turn a potato into a pearl? My fingers plait smooth hot salt and the teaspoon of honey melts in a song. Two figs and a promise with each sip; mama shall walk on water tomorrow.
April 2002 First Place I walk like a tap-dancer with a joke in my pocket because I'm rhythmic and untouchable. I juggle whatever I hold in my hand making everybody laugh. My hips go yah! and yah! Where is the dark and the silent? Second Place when she nudges him out of a dream at four a.m. to rub her tush. "Why should I rub your tush?" he mumbles, trying to slip back beneath his warm, flannel subconscious. "Because I like the way it feels when I'm lonely," she says. And, of course, the illogic of it keeps him awake: the idea that loneliness somehow migrates south -- a decade's worth of Saturday nights and singles clubs instinctively flocking together to drift down her back. It's like the way she's started asking him to buy Kotex: "As long as you're going out, pick up some pads for me," she says, cutting up carrots in his sink. And he just wishes she wouldn't call them "pads" because it spoils his memory of high school football -- the image of him high-fiving the guys in the locker room with Kotex taped to his shoulders and legs. So he finds himself crossing off items on her shopping list -- not even coming close to the familiar sandwich meat and frozen dinner sections. And the check-out girls all know what's going on - smiling at the Betty Crocker and broccoli in his cart, and calling for price checks on her extra-absorbent, heavy-flow, feel-fresh-all-day "pads." That's when he makes up his mind to rip down her lacy curtains, toss the curling iron and feminine hygiene products out on the lawn and change all his locks... but when he finally pulls into the driveway, the strangely inhabited look of his house makes him wonder where his own loneliness has migrated. So when she asks why he's smiling while he rubs her smooth, shapely tush at four in the morning, he says he's waiting for a genie to appear, and listens as her laughter soft-shoes around the room and makes itself at home in their bedroom carpet Third Place Nothing disturbs the berm as it aspires towards a grassy knoll, the path to your misgivings. I pocket them, touch my freckled hollow, my whiffet. Here, take a digit, an ounce. I practice the reverse of no, of knowing. My cock points towards the moon. Things fall off. I pick up stones from wet morning grass, wash them in my cheeks. I speak of love and poetry, rigmarole and poppycock. Who is the you of this? Not the wife I left, caught embracing the wide windows of another man¹s life. I know you are out there too. I save my broken teeth for when we meet, your dress, bone-buttoned, scrunched about your hips. There¹s not much left. I sit in the grass and count the birds. I could name them if it mattered. Sulky whiff, cat bait, breath of my dark. I wait. Nothing creeps closer. Honorable Mention She counts owls not sheep- night vision picks out every one she's ever bagged: the great horned that woke her at three with resolute hooting, the two saw-whets one snow-covered November afternoon only a short tramp through the brush from each other, the hawk owl that spent the winter on her street strafing voles in the stubble out back, the curious great gray that flew down to get a better look after she ducked behind a tree to reload, a squall of snowies, most picked off light standards or telephone poles. She talks to barred owls before a shoot, exchanging recipes and gossip. One chatted for an hour after a solar eclipse, not realizing how late it was. And she dreams of a barn owl, so rare in these parts. Eventually, she'll pack the lenses and fly south, but tonight fantasy will suffice: a heart-shaped face gleams at her from a sagging hayloft, waits until she leaves because the night is long. Honorable Mention My grandmother raised raspberries white ones and black ones and red ones. One Sunday, after my dad and uncles had returned from The South Pacific, she and I picked a basket of red ones because my uncle Russell liked them best. Grandma climbed the steps to a screened in back porch with the rounded basket of berries. I, a gentleman of five, opened the door quietly because Russell was there on the day bed sleeping. But the screen door slipped, the strong spring slammed it shut like a rifle shot. In one incredible motion, The sleeping Russell rose and caught his mother by the throat. Raspberries went everywhere. Grandma was not badly hurt except for ugly bruises where thumb and finger pressed and a sore stomach where the sleeping Russell, knifeless, tried to disembowel her. Later, Grandma joked, "Beware of slamming doors when Russell sleeps." I know the story well because Grandma explained about Russell so I would lose my fear of him. But I have only one clear image of my own. I remember watching, in dismay, from among the raspberry bushes and wondering what to do about my uncle Russell hunched on the back steps crying and crying. Honorable Mention I stay with Mr. George. Been staying here for sixty years today. Daddy told the preacher I was fifteen, but I'm seventy-two and Mr. George is eighty. After my first baby, I didn't want no more. This evening all four of my girls with my grandbabies will be here, and both my sons. They'll want to take pictures of me hugging Mr. George in his wheelchair. They can take what they want. I ain't hugged him in forty years, no need to start today. Been staying here in this same house all these years tending to him like my mama told me I had to. I wipe the oatmeal off his face and clean him up in the bathroom. The walls of this old house are so thin I have to listen to him snore every night, but I got no place else to stay-- and wouldn't want to stay no place else 'cause I'm used to staying here. Mr. George don't bother me much anymore. I sit him in his chair on the porch and let the afternoon sun warm his cold bones. Then I feed him and put him to bed and I sit up and read those stories my granddaughter brings me every week. The ones I like the best are where they kill the mean sumbitches in the end. She gets them at the book exchange, and sometimes when Mr. George can't sleep I read him the good parts, and so's he don't lose interest, I add some good parts myself, all the details about how the bad ones die, until he waves his hand. "That's awful stuff," he says. "No more than mean folk deserve," I answer. Then I leave him alone to wonder and sleep. I stayed with Mr. George for sixty years, best you believe we understand each other. He'll die one day soon. The choir at Antioch Baptist Church will sing hallelujah over his coffin when Mr. George goes someplace else to stay. I believe I'll stay right here by myself, sit on the porch, rock, read my stories, and say my thanks for the peace and rest. Honorable Mention There's a turnstile where prize roses once stood, and for two bucks I can stand where you stood pissing after a hard night of black coffee and endless revision. Presbyterians have joined the fence line; an old umbilicus of Gloria Patri refrains from summer youth camp. The lake where you'd dance rainbow from the tip of a hook before breakfast, has a sign in knee-deep water: "Use of Flat Rock Residents Association" It is all gone- the heave and strive of empire, sweaty, stripped to the waist, ring of hammer on steel, the smell of coke in the air, rails giving under the weight of a passing freight- gone, this brawling land you loved. They tell me you watched inconsolate from your veranda, rings of smoke through pine boughs, Highland Hospital burn as Zelda Fitzgerald danced her best in rooms of fire. The poet's heart in you was overturned, refusing food or ink for days, refusing now to leave this place, these hills , you son of ashes, you rusty ghost.
May 2002 First Place I see America traveling, the lurching prairie schooners like overcooked hotdogs, the popeyed oxen, the hot frazzled women, thin scrawny men with the bugs of the trail in their whiskers (my pappy and me come west in '36, I was one of seventeen kids ) I see you tortured in vast summer heat wearing your Prussian linsey-woolsey, you pioneers scratching, a sound like a thousand of rasps on crocodile hide. And here is a dog, with dopey lugubrious eyes, spotted and indolent, tan and white, baying at random, at nothing. The long line fades into mud trails, dry in the summer, cracked and volcanic, dusty and choking the pack trains. Your oxen transmute to horses, wagons to stagecoaches, fat wooden churns, wheels splintered on corduroy roads, lurching and tossing the passengers, (Hang on for dear life!), advancing to westward, Shakegut Express, filling the air with curses, loud lamentations, the stage capsizing, once, twice, a dozen times. How the carpetbags fly! Out of the east I see your black-armored serpent, hooting, filling the day with the lather of steam and black smoke. I have seen torrents of buffalo, consternated, thundering, waking the prairie dogs, whistle and bellow. I have been passenger, I have endured your indignities, putting out fires in the railway car, ash in my eye, cinders and grit in my face, I feel America jouncing. Out of the Spindletop, endlessly rocking, the ceaseless pumps of the oil wells, the mindless teeter-totters, bobbing ducks sucking petroleum. Their effluent fills these millions of cars, thick as lice in the concrete seams of the highways, maddened, thronging the shrinking roadnet, the hot harried women, career mamas, salesmen, nattering witlessly into their car-phones, gibberish filling the bandwidth, and quietly in someone's suburban garage, the larval concept of the personal helicopter, hatching, waiting to breed, waiting for Everyman, waiting for Everyman's skies. I shudder. America travels. Second Place # 1 Don't Peel The Grapes Don't peel the grapes. Just eat them. That is what you do with Bukowski. It is a sun and hamburger Saturday. If I drank beer, It'd be a beer and sun and hamburger Saturday. My son throws a rock in the air. It lands on my daughter's head. She bleeds on top of my white tee. She bleeds onto a wash cloth. She cries. Cries. Cries. I rock her until she feels better. Put the culprit in time out, make him apologize endless times. These are what my Saturday afternoons are like. Bukowski waits by the lawn chair. I go back and eat him up. He would have liked it that way. # 2 My Father Was A Poet Bukowski could have been my father. Had whores, rolled joints, smoked whole packs of cigarettes in a day, stared out of his front porch in his underwear, walked the streets of New York, puked and took a shit at the same time. Went to the races, bet his pay check on horse number 4, had so-called friends that would have raped me or my sister given the chance. Had a good wife that never did anyone any wrong. Gave him his only children that we know of. Remembered her in one or two his poems, gave them to her as if they were written with his penis. She has them stacked away along with the lock of hair his mother saved from when he was baby. # 3 The World According To Bukowski I had to drink red wine in the middle of the afternoon to write this poem. According to Bukowski, to write a good poem, you must have: 1-Several bad affairs. 2-Been in love with a red haired girl. And some other things not worth mentioning. To be a good poet, you need to jerk off a couple of times a day. There is so much time in between while you wait for that big one, the one that gets put aside while you contemplate the neighbor's cat as it takes a shit by the fence. Or while you wait for the next whore to knock on your door, the postman to bring you another invite to a poetry reading, just so some groupie can rush to the stage, screams to do it to her right there and then. How could one man be so lucky? Throws up inside the strings of the University's only grand piano, leaves knowing that someone will be writing about it long after he is dead. Something like what I am doing now. Something like what I never want to be. Let me be lousy. Let me be one of those housewives that writes while drinking red wine in the afternoon. I finish the red in the cheap wine glass, wait for Jim to come home. Third Place It's not the water that hammers the roof, or the thunder that strikes sky like a great stomping boot caked with mud and other debris that tells me rain is here. When I wake in the morning I already know a front is moving in, passing thru, swelling down atop us like arthritis on an old knee: cool air over warm, pressure dropping and popping the joints right out of whack. But we all creak eventually and I can't complain if my bones started sooner than most because I like the idea of clairvoyance. Weather answers to my pronouncements. And it's not the green clouds above or ringed hazy moon of last night that tells me hail is coming today. No. You've gotta get old enough to feel it. It's good storytelling. It's about that old twister that blew through thirty years ago, lifted the house right off the ground and set it down all crooked in the orchard, the dog still in the upstairs bedroom barking and barking out the window with grammom's pink lace curtains caught on his ear. The kids like to hear about this. They don't mind me creaking about the place muttering about hail on the pansies, predicting loose winds and wicked drops of mercury and watching the sky. They don't think I'm crazy. They still like sitting out the porch counting the spaces between flashes. Every second counts. Only the very young and old can do it right. Honorable Mention I am positive I will misquote a deaf friend by writing this, the same as I'll reassemble Einstein by saying we can never declare abstinence from light, never transcend the velocity of its particulars ˆ we will never know the meaning of true silence. At a relevant point in time everything we love becomes grounded in sound; even in death, nerve endings become believers in resurrection, in the echoed cadence of blood marching within oppressed veins. Life is never that forgiving. Stars will implode in less time than it takes us to answer rhetorical questions unhinged from cluttered tongues. "Do you love me?" takes on the din of "Do you want me?" The context becomes lost between the dream and the awakening. Eventually we fall back on remembrance and how it felt groping for wind inside the womb, how the agenda centered a round what a hum would look like outside the skin. We remember it as ghost chant through walls: the sweep of palm against belly, the resistance of breath through pores upon hearing the first lullaby rock light to sleep. Yet for all this ventless effort, we fear conformity to solitude. We whistle a song to turn back its onset, file "love" under "lust" in the process, confuse "sacrifice" with "redemption." Everything else we swat at with brooms as we would a bee trapped in some dusty closet of the brain. Always, we'll tilt our heads searching for the next buzz, ponder how many fingers it takes to tune false ribs, consider how mouths can hold more consonants than teeth. Honorable Mention The guy returns with a warm washcloth and towel and cleans him off gently scrubbing the detritus of their fun, handling him with masculine delicacy. He knows his etiquette, looks at the clock, says "I should be leaving" the other does not disagree, but offers "I'm going to have something to eat, you're welcome to join me." He dresses while his host puts on water and a robe. They sit at the table sipping tea, sharing a scone, talking lightly, as though they were casual friends. On the way to his hotel he reflects that the trick to happiness is to live in the present with a wall between yourself and the absence of any possibilities.
June 2002 First Place Often it was about salvage-- saving that little bit. I remember my mother weighing a turkey breatbone in her hand, deciding it was just enough for soup, let¹s not throw it out yet. Flawed carrots followed, scraped and pared, whittling away the bad parts. Celery, potatoes, whatever was left over. Waste not. She smoked her cigarette to the filter. I apprenticed at her elbow, watched the careful sparing of small scraps, agreed the taste was richer than store-bought. It stuck to the ribs and also to the brain, thrift became a holy principle. Second Place Tell me something. What good could have come from this? I'm prone in a wildflower field in Eagle, Colorado. I have bourbon in my glass and I don¹t drink. I feel queasy. There is a gathering of people behind me under a rented canopy, the white ones used for weddings and times like these. All of them knew you better than they know me. They carry canapés in their hands, stories of your exploits on their lips, undigested grief in that tender spot below the breastbone. I'm clawing at the knapweed and they pretend there’s nothing wrong with that because they¹ve already decided I'm deranged. What could I have told her about her late father that she wouldn't have already known? That a blackball in the bloodstream is as inheritable as your fear of water, your love of Escher, your proclivity for laughter? That we ignored the risks of genetic disease, birthed her anyway? What good could have come of her being? Better to know we loved her well enough to leave well enough alone. It is mid June. The lupine are late to bloom this high in the hills and there is no child who requires an explanation of love and death. Nor to lose to them either. No stranger at a wake need lead her away from a mother who lays in the dirt. All this is easier without her than with her. It is, isn¹t it? Speak to me. Third Place You blame the sun for going down each day, then go to bed, close your eyes, and sleep, not thinking of the earth that turns away. You'd reach peaks, over clouds, and survey great sights, if only the dark were not so deep. You blame the sun for going down each day. You toil and sacrifice for meager pay and care for what you have and what you'll reap, not thinking of the earth that turns away. Friends and friendships die and loves won't stay, your head hangs low, you hold your face and weep. You blame the sun for going down each day. Reflections show your youth replaced by gray, and you surmise: buried with the past, to keep, not thinking of the earth that turns away. Twilight haunts and swallows each last ray. The last sunset appears to you too steep. You blame the sun for going down each day, not thinking of the earth that turns away. Honorable Mention Before I make up the forest I fill it with pheasant, with a curious moth, apples and pecans, and a wandering serpent (who later becomes a troubadour) I mop the forest floor, I hang curtains in trees, I string cranberries and popcorn in the limbs of the hemlocks above. This is before the blight, before thunder and lightning. I pick your pockets, I brush out your blond pony tail. You take off everything but your argyles. I hang your pocket watch off its long fob, directly over our heads. I kiss the pulse on your neck. I want to say a word, a phrase, but we haven't studied Socrates. I'm not even sure if we've invented him, truthfully. We are consistent with soft rain, with peacocks, and conch shells. We scatter sea glass. Of course there is a tortoise, of course there is a hare. But there are words you are afraid of, in between sighs and cuckoos, in between green mountains and hovering dragonflies. All the lanterns we have strung, the grinning monkeys, the silver slip of a moon. You touch my lips with your finger and tell me "no" You thrust and sing. The pocket watch swings back and forth rhythmically dropping minutes. Honorable Mention 1. At five o'clock he lay awake and where he hadn't been he was, and where he thought he'd been he hadn't: and his voice said five. At five-oh-five he left his bed and as the morning moved from darkness into day he brushed and cleaned and shaved and cleared the mess away: and a voice said four. At five to six he wrote a note, 'I think it matters' and having planned for many years for just this moment, he rang the bell and waited for the nurse: And her voice said three as the clock said six and they went out and found the rumored north-west passage and his voice said two and his voice said one and in the end cold desolation and the corridors, two open doors and all the rest is dreams. 2. Who would believe him any way--- the frame so tight that blood comes through the pores the drill a pressured presence and the brain left open to the air and no one there but him can tell if they are getting anywhere, don¹t put it there where I can see that flicker of light, don't put it there where half my body screws up tight I am in pain, I am in fright I lie awake and it is all a dream. The rest is life. Honorable Mention We wonder how it came to this, smoking our cigarettes hard, as if that inhale could shrivel the words we know we'll say, as it does our lungs. She hasn't seen her girl in three weeks, thinks she fell in with a gang, drugs. I've had it. I won't worry about her anymore she asserts, hand shaking as she takes a drag. Detectives have been to her home to look around, question. She says they never asked if there was a father in the house. Some things are a given. Most detectives are men. Life is funny that way. Our lips clasp the filtered ends like their mouths did nipples once long ago, before we understood what hopeless really meant. My boy called me a bitch last night. Sometimes I hate him, truly, I tell her, as I blow smoke rings toward a tall man's balding head. The rings get larger, circling his neck, tightening, until his tongue bulges purple and my ex-husband lies dead, last words forgive me. Imagination is funny that way. We talk tough, hands on hips, jaws set in a jut. Smoke hangs in the air between us, like our lies. I see her wet, frantic eyes through it, and I know she sees mine. We crush butts under pumps and go back to work, breathing.
July 2002 First Place Only time I ever saw him, he was shooting free throws
At that basket they used to have in the parking lot behind the Mt.
Moriah Church of God.
It was blackberry time, so hot the flowers drooped over on the bricks,
But he kept swishing
Them in, fourteen straight shots while I stood there,
Sweat pouring off of him and the veins on his arms stuck out thick
as pencils.
"Better not get too used to that thing, mister," I said, "that hoop
Is not regulation, it's three
Inches too high, person that put it up was some kinda Mexican or something."
He went on shooting and didn't even look at me when he answered, like
I was a heckler messing at him
from behind the bench.
"You blong to this church?" he said.
"No, sir," I said, "I live over on Harris Street, we're sort of Presbyterians."
"I thought so," he said. "Well, if you think I give a hoot for regulations, you are
sadly mistaken, and if you were
Any kind of Presbyterian at all, you would put
Your faith in the spirit, not the law."
As if to prove it, he pumped in twenty-seven more, and not one of them so much
as touched the rim.
"How many is that?" he said.
"Forty-one," I said.
"I thought so," he said, and he gave a tiny, private kind of smile and tucked
the ball under his arm, turning
To look me straight
In the eye. "How many you think I can do?" he said. "Think I can make
it a hundred?"
"Mister," I said, "what I think is I know
A hustle when I hear one, and besides, all I got on me is some pocket change so don't
waste your time."
He frowned, but the smile hung there like somebody had pasted it on, and the flowers
Jerked straight up like scared
Draftees, and a whole bunch of crows swooped down to strut in the trees, crying
Out worse than Knicks fans at the garden, and the sky,
the sky,
One minute it was
Clear and the next, it was lightning playing
from one end to the other.
"Be not afraid," the shooter said.
"I aint being afraid," I said, "it's just I'm having trouble catching my breath."
"Tell you what," he said, "I didn't come here to take your money, because this material
World does not interest me, so here's the thing: If I don't make it a even
hundred, without a break,
You can ask me anything you want to, and I will answer, cross
My heart, and if I win it won't cost
You a red cent"
Behind him, a rainbow jumped up,
And the sun was rising and setting all at the same time.
"What's the catch?" I said, but what I was really thinking was I wished I had gone
On to work instead of laying out and calling in sick.
"No catch," he said. "But if everybody bleeved in me from the start, where
would be the fun of it?"
"Okay," I said, "only if you don't mind, I got
to sit down cause it feels like my legs don't want to work right."
"I thought so," he said, and when he stepped back to toe
The line, dead bees
Started falling all around me, spattering on the blacktop like hail. By the time he had
it up to seventy-three, I was burning
With fever, and the goal kept wobbling like a mirage, like I was looking at it through
the flames.
Off in the dunes somewhere, I could hear
Him talking to his self, saying "What father among you, if his son
Asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent,
Or if he asks for an egg,
will give him a scorpion?"
"How many is that?" I said, because along
With everything else I discovered I had lost the gift of sight.
"Ninety-eight," he said.
"I thought so," I said, and Iaid back in the sand and started splashing
it all over me, trying to break down the fever.
"You ort to see yourself," he said, "I seen some poor
Losers in my time, but you take
the cake.
"Go on," I said, "get it over with, you take
Some kind of pleasure out of torturing people, is that it?"
All of a sudden, the air grew soft and balmy, and a breeze lifted up from Buffalo Creek,
And the sky,
the sky
Was so clean you could see way off to the bell tower at the university.
I stood up, and instead of feeling weak, I knew right off that inside
My body I was fourteen years old again, restless
And crazy, and so full of life it took my breath away. "Here we go," he said, "Ninety-
-and-nine."
But as he went into that flat-footed
Wide-legged crouch
Of his, a jump-jet from Cherry Point came looming in over the pines, stopping almost
on top of us and twirling
Around in a slow circle, so close overhead you could see the pilot,
Glancing around inside like somebody that wanted to ask which way
was Charlotte.
The ball banged
Off the rim and caroomed into a lilac bush next to the Fellowship
Hall, and no sooner did it happen than the Harrier lifted
Away again,
Wobbling off toward Albemarle with little puffs of smoke like something
from a Buck Rogers serial.
"Cheater," the shooter said, "anything I hate, it is a low-life cheat."
"Hey now lissen," I said, "I didn't have anything to do with that, that was
the U. S. Marines."
"Liar!" he screamed, and he raised
His arms and called forth the 1812 Overture and serpents twining
round my legs and whirling grackles
To peck at my privates. But it was all just a shuck
And he knew it, and when he saw I wasn't going to beg, he put a halt
To it right quick, and stumbled over
to the sidelines
And sat down with his head on his arms. "Go on," he said, "I'm a man
Of my word, ask your stupid question."
"Well," I said, "there is one thing that always
Bothered me a little bit and it's what happened there on Golgotha, if it isn't too painful
for you to talk about."
"No, no," he said, "that is my favorite part."
"Kay," I said, "thing is, if you were trying to die for our sins, how come you couldn't pick
something meaner
Than hanging on the cross?"
"You think that wasn't hell?" he said. "You just name me something worse."
"What about," I said, "a minié ball in your guts and you go down
At Gettysburg and you lay there for seventeen
hours before you give up? What
About you just been born and your mama throws
You in a dumpster with the
cord
Wrapped around you and the snow falling in your face and you aint even got a name?
What about
You are the prettiest girl in your class and you come
down with polio just
When they come up with a cure and you flop
Around for twenty-three years more dying every day of your miserable life? What
About you're trying to shoe your favorite mare and
she up and kicks your brain in on
The left side and you have to have somebody thereafter to change
Your diapers
Three times a day and wipe the drool off your face? And what
About, what say you
Get sentenced to
Five years in Central Prison and on the very morning
You're supposed to be released, five of them that hate you and revile you and say
all manner of things against you
Manage finally to lock you up in the shower and butt-fuck you over and over not
Just with their
Dicks but with fists, with bottles, with sticks, and they leave
You with your teeth smashed out on
the tiles
And your arms broke
and you get infected and die from your own
Shit because this is a Friday
And the doctor don't even come around till Monday."
"Was that last one you?" the shooter said.
"None of your beeswax," I said, but the tears were going slow-motion
down my cheeks and some things it don't take a fortune
Teller to guess
What the truth is. "I thought so," he said.
"I'm terribly sorry what happened, but don't everybody think that their life
Is the worst one of all? Where is the wise man? Where
Is the scribe? The Jews demand signs
And the Greeks seek wisdom, but the foolishness of God is stronger than men."
"Is that your answer?" I said. "What kind of damn
Fool answer do you call that?" He shrugged and pulled his sweatshirt back
On and gave out with a kind of loopy grin. "Let him who boasts,"
he said,
Boast of the Lord."
And he picked up the ball one last time and lobbed
In a three pointer from thirty feet out. "Drop around again sometime,"
he said, "we'll go a little one on one."
But he knew better
And so did I: what was the use? So I unbuttoned my shirt and let loose my wings
And they came unfolded like a pair of crossed
flags, pinions
Pumping to vault me on high
way out past the eaves of heaven, back over
Yonder to Harris Street, where the angels and the serpents walk
hand in hand
And the Sons of Man never have to pick apples
Or eat humble pie
And the unbaptized babies have a place to go home to when they die.
Second Place July stumbles toward me in the dark, a drunk bumming a light I don't have. Anxious firecrackers interrupt a mutt howling at the moon's smudge. Tentative fireflies flash, pretend they're stars. Two glasses of wine and I'm expansive as this humid night; sipping a third, I spread wider, expose my dead and dying light to the sky. Third Place "A secret and interior art" (Pope John Paul II, describing monastic life) The contemplations of the rose and weed are firmly rooted in the only ground that either knows. Each trembles in an equal wind; the grip of fervor never shows, the anchor set beneath the skin of earth, external calm a part of secret and interior art. The hawk and pigeon each know air as ground and wave, as waterfall and rapid, and the battle there is appetite unbound, for all an intimate transaction where the gain and loss are visible, a clearly posted end and start, not secret and interior art. But one alone is seen as split, sent to wander under the sky meat and spirit separate though chained, so neither can deny the other's law: arrested, it gives no excuse, no alibi, but must confess. Can this impart a secret and interior art? "Can silence find a harmony to match the song from sphere to sphere? If blindness is the eye to see that sky beneath the soil is clear, then utterance of truth can be the word beyond the mouth or ear and echoes flood the hollow heart in secret and interior art. Honorable Mention The beats are disintegrating while reentering the atmosphere, their orbits decaying like frozen meat in a power failure, a fractured phonology spraying radioactive cracker crumbs over shuddering parents, pederastic profs, poets in training pants, as spokespeople lips synch their own thoughts, tracing the erasing the path on a fatalistic horizon, praying for an end with general relief. The beats are flaking off like dry skin drifting away from an itchy beard. They parachute down to fill the buck book box at the used book store. Their black and white selves, each with a cigarette surgically attached, hover there like Hamlet’s dad haunting the stage’s edges, knowing their last scenes are done and when they take off the costume and lose the paint there won’t be shit left. All the New York coffee bar sitting, typewriter abusing, and amphetamine free associating into bugger all. The beats are standing at the lecterns, arms spread in that universal gesture of what the fuck don’t you get that I am Christ baby pose, while they threaten to crumble, like acid-soaked advertising drenched in sun. No well-meaning religion will ever conjure them back into a piece of true cross. The beats are just bouncing away, tap tap tap tap, like crap from a dropped box of jujubes on the sinful floor of some forgotten pornographic movie palace. The beats are tumbling to the ground in violent slo mo like rice at a wedding everyone knows is heading straight to divorce, the legions of lawyers counting every grain that’s falling to the ground, estimating their fading values. The beats are collapsing inwardly, like pumpkins in the happy compost pile, waiting for any damn Godot they can get, instead of this urban will-o-wisp. The beats are dragging to the sag wagon, falling like stalled erections that didn’t meet the pace when face to face with the wet, warm, desired place. The beats are evaporating like shallow puddles on a sad and artificial lot, like the rings of wet cups receding from imperfect circles of unfinished business. The beats are all of this, and less, and ever more available in gilt subscriber editions of an echoing nothingness. Honorable Mention I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD Hollywood is the cruelest place, breeding anorexia in the brightest starlets, mixing money and desire, stirring dull talent with sharp aspirations. Citizen Kane kept me sober, covering Hearst's yellow journalism in black and white. (Critics wondered if the film portrayed Hearst's ego or mine.) My Ambersons were not merely magnificent, they were sublime! To the merry sound of a zither, on Vienna's giant ferris wheel, I said, "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love-- they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." I was on top back then as Harry Lime, the world at my feet. I loved funfairs, the crazy house in The Lady From Shanghai, the bisected bodies, the torsos torn in pieces, the hall of mirrors. I loved magic, I sawed a woman in half in a circus tent on Cahuenga Boulevard. People said I was like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing. As Othello, I almost throttled Desdemona for real. When I left Hollywood in a hurry, I forgot my fake noses --I had them airmailed. How I hated my small upturned nose. "Wotzit anent Orson Welles? Behind the cloak of his genius, the hypnotic charm of his smile, he nurtures a hidden madness, which fanned by the flames of desire, drives him to live his greatest sin." You gave me the sled years ago; I called it "Rosebud." When I came back late from the studio, you were drunk from high balls; you'd been seeing someone else --I smelled his aftershave in the bedroom; knowing your infidelity, I was neither forgiving nor human, you looked into the heart of evil, my fists, the silence. I said, "All women are dumb, some dumber than others." O Lady from Shanghai, you who were once my wife-- I sawed you in half in the circus tent on Cahuenga Boulevard until Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios, put a stop to it --those studio execs always tried to put a stop to my best pranks, so I used volunteers, Johnny Carson, Marlene Dietrich. Marlene and I recreated the trick in Follow the Boys. I called my evil side, "Crazy Welles. . . Imperial Welles." Unreal City under the brown fog of an LA dawn, a crowd flowed down Sunset, so many, I had not thought the movies had undone so many. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Cotton! You who were with me in Kane, in The Third Man! The Magnificent Ambersons! Have we aged so soon? Are our careers over so soon? Are we forgotten so soon?" II. A GAME OF CHESS The chair I sat in, the burnished throne in Xanadu, the gigantic shadows cast by a silver candelabra, the table laid in profusion of sweetmeats. Eat my darling! Eat! This sustenance is not poisoned though paid for by ill-gotten gains. The rise of Kane, barbarous king in the democratic province chasing the lucre that all the world pursues. "She was one of those black-haired girls, skin as white as Carrara marble. I had to rape her offstage. I came on unbuttoned, dishevelled, Having had my way with her." But O O O O that Eliotian Rag-- Under the Bam Under the Boo Under the Bamboo Tree "So what if he dresses in drag, as long as he do it when I'm not around? So intelligent, so outre, so innovative!" "I disliked him at first sight. He wore a toupee, so obvious, flat and yellow, not fitting close. There is something phoney about a man who won't accept baldness gracefully." And here in Xanadu we shall play a game of chess, waiting for the knock upon the door to boom down the long hall. The studio execs never call, never call, never call III. THE FIRE SERMON Unreal City under the brown fog of an LA noon Mr. Goldwyn, the Hollywood mogul, unshaven, with a pocket full of celluloid With a wink and cufflinks of human teeth, asks me in demotic Yiddish to luncheon at the studio followed by a month at Cannes. The Hudson sweats oil and tar the barges drift with the turning tide a Commie sails wide to leeward, swings on the heavy spar. The barges wash drifting logs down past Ellis Island past Lady Liberty's Torch. Way late! Way late! Way late! I weigh so! Elizabeth and Orson parked by the roadside a Mercury coupe scarlet and gold wire wheels "Moonlight Serenade" on the radio I sawed a woman in half on Cahuenga Boulevard. Way late! way late! Way late! I weigh so! "Her feet were at Long Beach, and her heart under her feet. After the event I wept. I promised "a new start." Here in Hollywood can connect Nothing with nothing. Star Faithful Elizabeth Short The Black Dahlia The broken fingernails of dirty hands. Nothing." Ooh la la To Babylon then I came to Xanadu to Xanadu a sled is burning burning burning burning O Lord thou pluckest me away from life Rosebud burning IV. DEATH BY WATER Star Faithful, a long day's dead, forgot the cry of gulls, the foghorns of the ocean liners. A current under sea washed her pale skin in whispers. As she rose and fell she passed the stages of her age and youth, the nights in Long Island speakeasies, Manhattan hotels, O you who turn the steering wheel and drive west to Hollywood, consider Star, who was once as pert as you. V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID After the torchlight red on sweaty faces of the extras, after the nights in the Florentine Gardens, the smoke of Marlboros and Lucky Strikes the packages that arrived in the mail with cut-out letters. The wind had risen again. It came icily off the Danube and whipped up the snow in the tiny square. Harry Lime sat sipping ersatz coffee in the cafe. He wasn't dead but he wasn't alive either. In the corner, the telephone was ringing ringing ringing. D. W. Griffiths' Hollywood Falling towers Jerusalem Rome Athens Vienna London Los Angeles Unreal At Maxim's, a couple were dancing gloomily. At Chez Victor's, the heating had failed, couples huddled in their overcoats. Martins thought of the girl in Amsterdam, the one in Dublin, the one in Hollywood, he thought of Harry Lime, dead Harry Lime, the racketeer who made his money off children dying of meningitis. At three in the morning, Martins climbed the stairs to Anna's room. She was in her pink dressing gown. On the rumpled bed lay the script. He said, "Harry was in a racket, a bad racket, he was no good at all." They embraced. In the winter night, the thunder spoke over Vienna, out of the ice clouds, the snow. The giant ferris wheel swayed in the wind. Then spoke the thunder: What have you given? What have you taken? "Rosebud."
August 2002 First Place The first day she spends alone at my house I kiss her goodbye at the door, climb into my car and think about the Lost Colony -- the abandoned, alone-on-your-birthday feeling that always comes from loss - the way Jamestown lay like an unmated sock in the Tidewater woods -- colonists trading woolen coats for Croatan beads and buckskins, or abducted by aliens eager to learn the secrets of cross-stitch and butter-churns - the same aliens who probably observe with wonder the way she systematically sorts through all my possessions -- bravely spelunks under the kitchen sink, and carefully catalogs the contents of my medicine cabinet. Working her way up to photo albums and unpacked boxes in the back of my bedroom closet, she boldly presses forth into my wildest bachelor regions, blazing a trail through an un-ironed, khaki forest until she finally stumbles upon Virginia Dare and the rest of the colonists huddling around a campfire cobbled from old love letters and baseball cards. Second Place i. Alone at the loom, she has no helpful attendants dressed in bright colored fabrics, no voices chirping sweet, utter nonsense. Only a loom, battered and shining with the oil from her hands, and the smell of raw wool that is constantly present. ii. Each day, she weaves the threads, her beautiful reds, the rib ache of her blues and her purples, gold, silver, and ochre, and the rust brown that comes from small cuts on her fingers. iii. Each night, as colors fade in the torchlight, she devastates her handiwork with meticulous care, reassembles the wool into skeins for her morning’s work. iv. She prays to the gods at sunrise to stop the weaving, shatter the loom, burn its wood, send the room up in the flames, allow her to dance circling the heat of its yellows and oranges and the gray ashes before her, feeding the fire's insatiable appetite, burning her reason, pungent as incense. v. At sunset she pleads again for the sweet paralysis of apathy, to let her creation evolve out of its misery. To say: I am finished. To say: It is done. To shout to the hangers on, the myriad drunken men: Here's the damned tapestry! vi. The gods do not answer (when have they ever?) and she is compelled to follow their litany, a slave to a plot to make her their sacrifice. vii. She imagines the poet’s voice, the tale teller¹s eyes looking at empty space, wonders why he takes delight in her monotony? Over and under, under and through, day after night after day the same light, the same pinpricks of stars in the night mocking her. viii. It is not the husband she wants - husbands are failures. And she cannot remember him even to fantasize, even in the poet’s mind he is dead to her, dead as the dried husk of her sex, her menopausal seizures, dead as leaves on the olive trees in winter’s cold atmosphere, dead as her breasts that point to her stone floor. ix. In her deepest thought, discovered over and over, she dreams of her son as her savior. The warmth of a boy’s skin, the curve of his hips in her hands, his face hairless and smooth without razors, the sweet odor of breath when he speaks, his eyes, the pout of his lips, his kiss on her shoulder. These are her treasures. x. A son is all to a mother, dependent and rescuer. She wants him beside her naked and pure, to bruise his flesh into hers, drench herself in his lather. Wants to raise up a new king for the throne, depose her absent deceiver; escape the shame of her nightly dementia. xi. But this is impossible, she knows her son is no monster, it isn't the woman he wants, only the myth of a mother. Merest boy, passively loyal, not the wolf she desires, and she is their savior, she barters for time, barters with suitors, to save her own bastards. xii. The poet is another man to bargain with, another man with a future where she is a stage prop, a mere part of the chorus of praise for masculine sagas. xiii. She would be a killer, plot murders, hatch schemes that billow in scarlet, dry into rust in the dirt at her feet, coagulate as her choices. Instead, she waits to hear xiv. the birds sing the same songs each day, the old dog moan in his sleep each night the same, teeth stained and weak unable to chew bones, unable to rest peacefully. xv. It is madness, this weaving, unweaving her tapestry. She curses her son, her name, the old dog as it sleeps. Curses her odyssey. Third Place My neighbors are having a funeral, firecrackers pop and boom. Laughter reaches my window licks the frame. It is strange to realize fire is pain. Natives celebrate life with loss and I think of the baby, her tiny body thrown from a car like paper; a bird of print floating down to the road left behind. She is fire, soft hiss of a match, she is the tiny puppy on the grass, the one bought for a sister who was driving but who now sits, her hands reaching out for wet puppy fur, tiny yelps of need. I have heard of this before buying life for someone who wants death, pulling them back to earth. A mother is in some hospital bed, close to here, if she has a window, bends her neck she will see light. My children are rope, two knots that hold me down when nothing is left, no choice but to swallow, continue on. The mother and I are the same and yet we’re not, she has entered a world which haunts my sleep in shouts and dreams-- she is beyond loss. People offer her strings of possibility, she is young, they speak of stories of women who grow from fire like trees and I know this is what she fears. Life without rope, and how shadows and shapes are more real than a daughter wrapped in tar, a tiny figure of Grace flying away. Honorable Mention Worms got to an edge of the tomato patch. I can see their shit, holes in the leaves. My son moving to New York, for Christ’s sake. At nineteen? Wants to be a model? Ten feet of drain gutter hanging in front of this window for weeks now, since the ice storm. His mother must have filled his head with that New York shit. She’s never been there. Got half a cord of larch bucked up out back, need another cord before winter hits. How to tell a nineteen year old, a kid his age in New York is sleek leaf for tomato worms. Too many plants to pick bugs off every day. Guess I¹ll have to spray. Some years, you just have to. Honorable Mention She takes the six-forty everyday, a real zaftig mama running register at the Slavic Grill; slack tits and hair and broad, flat teeth stick perpetually to cracked lips like the biting aroma of onions and cabbages sticks forever to her skin and it floods the bus in sudden clarity, passengers think of home, of sweet sausage for supper and tired wives with tight asses, angry husbands with hard hands and nobody knows her name is Zinnia; sour old maid but somebody's flower and no one will guess she takes the six-forty everyday on a three-stop ride to see her daddy-man, fat black butcher who strokes her heavy head, kisses dry lips slick as they slap needy meat together until their pores spit vinegar, until the starving empty tastes onions, cabbages.
September 2002 First Place Banded by sawgrass and old, crusty willows, the secret lies hidden at Jefferson's Pond, where forged copper kettles spin wonders with sugar, drip toxic nirvana in old Mason jars. Stoked by a wood fire of hell-meat proportions, Jefferson poked it with billows of iron. At midnight, he tapped it, I took such a sweet sip it foamed off my eyelids with kids of it's own. Smooth on the fingertips, smooth on the barrel rolls 'cross your native tongue, tightens your loins metal on foreskin, it charms like a little slug on a bottle, inchworming along. Slathers of catfish still jump from the whirlpool briskets with whiskers, cold, fresh from the pond saute in butter and serve with a handful of pan fried potatoes in parsley and lime. All night elixir free-flowed from the bottle and we were transported to regions beyond. I dreamed of eggplant and lusted elusive diaphanous maidens from all nearby farms. Married by morning to Hayden Frock's daughter a wise-made decision once I weighed the odds Save me from bacchanal spent in one night of bliss; save me from Winchester marital bonds. Second Place For Billy Collins, After "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July" And so, I take you crabbing on the Chesapeake in August- Into the flat bottom boat, the floor paint flaking old and gray; Into the steady vibration of engine, the diesel rising like broken wind against salted air; Into the newborn scream of the gulls which hover motionless above, as though attached by wire. Into the heat of the sun, baking skin crisp, until all you can smell is fresh sweat, old fish, cheap beer; Until all you can see is the blueness of the shells mounting, mounting in the tan bushel baskets, the whiteness of the boat against the blue, blue sky, the flat bottom rocking, rocking from side to side, up one wave, down the other, into the early morning wake of a thousand ghostly trout liners. And there on the horizon where the sky greets the water, you meet yourself and know that always, always there will be this. And in that moment, you turn to me, grin with your cigarette pinned between your teeth, and say this is poetry. Third Place Hortense watered my delirium with her silk hose. Sudden and swift I, the fetishist of late, appreciate the dangle of heel, but not a mangle of rhyme. Some other time. Right now a lucky strike means a near-perfect game, bowl a frame with me, velocity of a dry run will taunt you, your white shoulders shrug a pale song. I sing along. Wouldn't want you to be Veronica Lake, I couldn't take the intrigue in your eye, as if you were whispering the ugly truth that war bonds a loose nation, that voluptuous mystery is a dangle of half of something as a big band blows at 78 RPMs. O femme-fatale, fast-forward through spastic rhymes of smashing pins, in beer and Tabu, with a poodle on every skirt. It couldn't hurt. In the face of the enforced past you of a time I can't dismember are willing to sing along, those unassuming bobbypins match your chocolate eyes, a minor detail to savor the flavor of. Hey Toots Sunshine Brianna-Brytnnii Rosie Riveter it's your big palooka wavy gravy coming to take you bowling again. We'll make it this time, Ronnie and Donny and maybe Big Dick'll be there. Love your hair, Hortense, and that cute poodle, Oodles. Honorable Mention Honorable Mention Honorable Mention
October 2002 First Place Second Place Third Place Honorable Mention Honorable Mention
November 2002 First Place Second Place Third Place Honorable Mention Honorable Mention
December 2002 First Place Second Place Third Place Honorable Mention Honorable Mention Honorable Mention Honorable Mention
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