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 Winning Poems from 2005 January • February • March
January 2005 First Place Rump of wind almost played out. The curtains in and later out. Half-drunk bees lean into phlox and ivy beds. Birds somewhere, but not far off. A clarinet dropped carelessly by the white trellis. Hair brush and apple, a still life on the desk. Room light becomes anemic, ceases to move. Scattered music sheets, metronome. Uncapped fountain pen, letter knife, monotonous ticking clock. The afternoon slowly running out. Perched in the corner of the room, knees up and braced against the wall, reading a letter for the third time. You think: she could spring at any time and tear the beating heart from the small cave of your chest. Second Place Mother climbs from her grave nightly, the moon sliding, bone white, along that fragile passage from day's end to beginning. She re-arranges plastic flowers, talks to other coffin-freed friends, polishes the naked cross that guards the faithful dead. Lilies once bordered the shrubs surrounding our house like a moat. White ones. Yellow ones. Striated ones. Soft scented sentinels poking their heads up through the warm soil each Spring. My mother's pride. Fake carnations grace her headstone now. Stiff, like the bodies lined in neat rows beneath her; cold like her own body which will never again climb into a warm bed or scatter the crows that yet steal from our abandoned cherry tree. They suck the fruit cheerfully, despite old clattering pans and one rotten scarecrow with eyes picked as empty as the spaces where lilies once danced with the wind. Third Place Monday afternoon Randy sends roses, burgundy buttons posed coquettishly in a glass vase, crossing their long stems in a pool. The dressing room is stale with beer bottles, weekend-beaten G-strings, half-smoked joints and these lovely roses like bloody tears. My palms sweat. The strobe throws yellow halos on the wall. Below the stairs the trebles of men peak a cheer. In the VIP loft, a new girl brushes a silver-haired man's hand away from her nipple. Her silhouette is luminescent. The roses are reflected in the mirror behind her as she dances. Inside that mirror I sit beside the roses. She sways between me and the roses. Inside the mirror, she pushes his hand away from them. Fingertips caress roses within roses within roses, our worlds touch and touch and touch. She and I--infinite bodies--silent echoes. Twenty dollars to be swept into this fantasy, made unaware that below the rail another girl dances the same slow motions, the waitress drops off a tray of shots, the manager nurses his Curacao, and the doctor who drank too many scotches waits by the exit for his taxi. The silver man reaches for the roses again, squeezes the tips; they pinch into a new soft form. He's buying her image to alter later, memorizing the aroma of her coconut lotion, her shoulder's salty aftertaste. There may be minutes in his mind when he's allowed to slip a finger into her thong, feel the smooth slit get wet, suck her neck--a rerun played over and over-- Love is a three minute song. Romance grinds on anonymous laps. In ten years, the hands that grab, tuck her into their pocketfuls of fantasy will be like so many assumptions that are uncomfortably easy to feel and forget, colorless, odorless, tasteless as air and flowers will trouble her. Honorable Mention I The sun slinks into its place: an errant teenager who'd partied all night sneaking up a trellis to his room to remain for the rest of the day, dimly present, offering no illumination on where he has been. II The morning's dampness is a whetstone that sharpens blades of memory and need. Old bones and breaks begin their barometric chores-- dowse the day's outcome by the amount of pain felt. Maroon milo tops perform Klaxon duty-- warning of an inevitable hard freeze. Small animals leave trails through rimed grass, eyes constantly to the sky. III Thousands of starlings serve as nature's screensaver-- an undulation above freshly reaped fields. Hundreds spiral down in a tornado of wings seeking grain remainders as a harvest of opportunity. As the multitudes mill around the stubble, increasing brethren leave the aerial amoeba to join the earth-bound congregation. When some unknown number is reached-- an avian flash point-- the birds burst skyward, twist the entire mass a few yards away and repeat their geometry until the ground is barren. Honorable Mention a cardboard box curbs are six inches high when you account for heels lifts and the wash of leaves after a rainstorm cereal comes in two sizes of boxes swaddling clothes the average rainfall in december is three inches not accounting for snow straw and other detrius fast food packaging accounts for two-thirds of all paper garbage discounting newspaper the enquirer is not rachel in the womb babies drink amniotic fluid distinguish dark from light hear voices feel pain tiny fingers have prints like the fall of ash
February 2005 First Place "After all you are weary of this old-time world" --Apollinaire after all you are weary of how your neighbor or friend says this or that says mysteriously did you notice the altered swaying of our mutual sweet gum tree and we missed you in church again these past few years you have lost confidence in an assortment of popes and lovers you have staked much even your life and livelihood on your art and architecture boxes and packages oh how your web of dishes and wedding gifts has expanded and you manage to care for your own young a surprise and a half to your hoary forbears you saw them Tuesday that is you plan to see them next Tuesday and if they are late you will snap your fingers and that imaginary imp that's been following you around will opine and drive off this airport boredom the vacuous feeling left by the overpriced beer you almost thought you were one of the seven wonders of the modern world there for a couple of minutes and then you were strolling along your street pretending it was prettier you pretend you live there to spy on people because you happened to see unexpectedly someone you know from your youthful office days a memory surfaces a drink over lunch a woman's wig the bad smell of the debutante's feet how many times you have wished you could fit into that small box house a shack with black shutters you see now how it fits on this street Second Place By ember-light in an acacia clearing, she hums an Afro-Cuban lullaby as faces watch in shadow: blood red Caribs, Conquistadors, Communistas. Dawn at Gitmo: a parched crescent is lapped by Caribbean blue; skin-tearing cactus, two rows of chain-link garnished with razor wire. No longer just sailor accents of Flatbush or Biloxi, liquid Spanish of Havana or San Juan; now the guttural of Kabul, Beirut, Teheran, of captives in prison orange in wire cages. She claps in time to gourd rattle, calfskin drum. She's a news-bringer, praise-singer, carrying scars for her murdered son. Ghost guerillas move in the shadows; chamber click, snake hiss, panther snarl. Patiently, the griot blows on the embers, to illumine the future. Underbrush rustles. A spirit conflagration sets fire to the night. Third Place I am a wheelwright, in the evening I take in the broken: spokeless, warped, splintered, the wheels roll in, neighbors and friends drop them off with faces like those whoíve lost god. Who am I? I say to myself in the dust of my tools. I respoke the missing, rub smooth the angled, untwist the warped, remake the utterly ruined. I work nights. My lunch comes when the sky is dark and birdless. In the morning I give back what I have done to smiles and relief; more work can be done. I will eat today because of wheels. I will travel and read and love and believe in god today, because of smaller gods. Honorable Mention When you are away I move the bed closer to the wall so your absence does not wake me. I check, recheck doors, a childís breathing, gather the piles of our day, leave them on the floor. In translation Ana is lonely and Celan dying but it does not matter, books fall from the bed. You will never return unless of course you do, as promised. Doubt moves in sets up residence and this knowledge of need, the very need of you straightens my back against the wall till I sleep.
March 2005 First Place Of polished wood and desolated space I have grown weary -- most of the case goods auctioned or given away. I speak to buyers about first-rate schools, unobstructed views of city lights over the ridge when fog dissipates. I do not tell them my husband died here, mine the only mind appalled by the eyesore of a corpse on the carpet. This house is finished with me, done gulping from decanters of grief and guilt. It pines for the melody of children ringing in the hall like the glittering ping of glass wind chimes. On the eve I am to leave, I trace palms over newly painted walls, mourn the loss of fortuitous stars on the ceiling. Press my body against the bedroom floor where he was laid, surrender impressions of Rafflesia blooms. Flatten lips on cold kitchen tile, repeat my name over and over, as if it could repine beneath the eaves of my absence. Second Place When I had no hands I carried our son between my teeth, bathed him with my elbows, dressed him by sheer will and brushed his hair with my twisted toes. When the forest was blackest I saw souls suddenly among the trees saying, go this way, go this way. Even in dark moons I had milky breasts to feed him and when it rained I carved a cave in the rock with my tongue and we hunkered down. Third Place I didn't think of you today. I carried a basket of apples to the kitchen, peeled their skin to the length of my arm. The water boiled, and I dropped the apples in, watched them detach themselves from their cores. The water turned as white as winter. All across the orchard apples lie like the roundness of beetles. Each night the fox comes for me. He waits at the gate- folded road. He knows the light sauce I'll pour on my apples. He knows the way he'll eat my apple heart. Honorable Mention & you and i and you would not, now, not & i and you and i would not, now, not, in autumnâs hushed whisper, when then becomes now, and now, in stark stillness, i scan a sameish field, grown fallow and rutted, as i watch the dead appear, moving slow like mist, that takes familiar form as i slide slow across the space where smooth lips once parted without effort to breathe concept into form; to fill spaces in between breaths, when you would release me at midnight with the nudge of a single finger tip you would release me at midnight in the guise of a little white bird you would leave me to flit amongst the bodies of the fallen soldiers you would beckon me to lift the eyelids of the mouldering dead i would, in feckless freedom, winnow through the fertile clay beneath the humid earth of one womanâs living history all the time my back turned brazenly to the moon the secrets of the dead would refine my silhouette define my outmost boundaries as white on black and afterwards I would return at dawn with secret maps of you you told me that nothing i said nothing you said you said nothing would ever come between us between us but between us is where i, not you, i, am rooted and you, not i, you, have grown brittle as husk discarded by insect having shed its skin i find now that my wings have been clipped and i leap back from the nothing in between them and you and i am dust dull mist soft silt sliding over dry earth no longer gently leavened by sweet breath that you would now hold fast behind closed lips and in between smooth finger tips and i, facing the moon, the sun at my back
April 2005 First Place If I sleep
with your other you
will you consider me
unfaithful
or yourself a victim
of life's inaccuracies?
Then again
maybe it was just
my other me
and
I can consider myself
redeemed.
Second Place The zenith only reaches my eyebrow so can't hold my life inside it. Crows tow a grim weight across the sky. It's all arranged by science, even the rain. Everything will go to hell, that's what it all comes down to. There won't be some merciful boat family to pull us aboard, or toss acacias to the churn. I know I've spent too long thinking how the wind lisps, traipsing in the trees. Lately the house is so still at the back of my mind I'm afraid of myself, here on the bottom of the sky. Third Place It was not death she feared but wings, startled and dense searching the September fields for corn. Every autumn she'd pull the car to the side for crows crossing the sky. Once, one landed on the hood of her car and a tree followed. An omen? When I told her in Jung's book of symbols birds represent self, the darker the color the more repressed the need, she laughed then sighed. It is all hunger, she said hunger and flight.
May 2005 First Place when the shell cracks and yolk fades into the blackened pan, and flocks of paprika sizzle in pools of oil popping, when the melon moon dangles soft across the silence of your home's external frame, glance outside your window for the final touch of taste -- stop to feel the steady shake of all the quiet pressed into the meals you make. Second Place Eventually I was placed on a bed like a boat. --Julia Darling Her body, the hull of a leaky boat, her yellow arms, oars about to fall off, the room, an egg-shaped ache and the sky full of dirty windows. Guilt stalked, shadowy and caged as Rilke's panther--I didn't do enough, I said too much, she rued. Time was teething; time was toothed. Light was muted but still bright through the transparent skin, veins apparent as the twigs from the tree, scratching at the window. Why won't somebody let it in? The fall had stopped at last, alas, and drops glittered like Egyptian beetles. In the kitchen they were balking and mewling: What to say to the dying woman. She tried to tell them: It's hard to let go but she couldn't be heard above the tea kettle's shrill whistle. The scent of crushed chives and the coos of mourning doves warned her through the Demerol. She was not immune to omens. Her slippers felt abandoned, forlorn so far below. How long had it been since she'd stood on two legs? How long had it been since she'd felt the earth solid and whirling beneath her soles? Yesterday? When the door swung open like a jaw, she knew it was time to go even though she didn't want to. It was like taking her lover in her mouth, taking him down, down her throat. Afterwards, still clinging to her stone hand, he swore her last words were: The air is whinnying. Last thought as she rode off on the broken-backed stallion: The body, bastard that it is, can't be trusted. Third Place The tide will wash up as far as the green rock and then it won't, the sea birds will drop their shells, the man on the yacht will throw back his head and laugh and though there are pictures of him in all the albums, he won't know you tomorrow when he picks up your little girl, he'll drive away without a word, three years it's been and he won't say a word but he will roll down the window so she can wave goodbye tossing love from her small white hand like sea spray. Honorable Mention I did not go into this undertaking without trepidations, I knew that traveling an underground river would have its unnerving moments its unexpected twists and turns: the skulls of lost souls, the souls of lost skulls, the skulls of lost bodies, the disembodied spirits of the damned - moonless nights, sunless days, trees with colorless leaves and swarms of low-flying bats, red-eyed rodents, slithering snakes, creeping insects of every size and description but your luminescence took me completely by surprise.
June 2005 First Place He gave me to drink from his dented tin can. It was surprisingly cool: not bad for tap water. The living/kitchen area was vastly infertile- with two lawn chairs posing as rainy-day furniture and a gooseneck sink next to a circa 50's icebox. The place was clean. One ill fitted window on a wall faced a faded-yellow sheet that dangled in place of a bedroom door. He grabbed a towel, rinsed it; with his hand quietly on my elbow, he led me through the managing curtain. My trembling stopped. A twin bed, stack of law books and nightstand huddled in the center of the room. There was lunch neatly tucked in a napkin on the table along with the leather box monogrammed T.J. That's where he kept the old letters. I dared to ask how he came to save them when everything else was lost. I must have appeared as an apparition that traveled from the past and arrived in pulled smoke- whose accident outside the front yard disturbed a valley silence. He wiped drying blood from my forehead, asked if I was hungry. Before I answered, he tore the cheese sandwich in half. Second Place We were embarrassed by what you wanted to do. You made us promise, strong hands now weak, wringing the deed out of us. We drank, laughed self-consciously that summer afternoon, hot as the red peppers you considered fertilizing, in a mad fit of immortality. Instead, your ashes, sifted fine to feel, were nervously placed and stirred in two gallons of paint. Bone white that matched no chip. You on the shed. Two coats cover the tears of our craziness. Third Place The wishbone snapped, marginally amended to two bits in a hand full of snaps, fingers scratch and bleed to songs of blood on the winsome organ. Magdalene, please. Would you like dessert, perhaps pie, my reclusive waiter queried in a sudden tone of terror, want of further words. You know me, my mainstay: how horrible it is to admit hunger. The world, yes it's flat beyond the horizon of the beloved sunset, grey ends of the manic skydrop hug a warty moon. These few last beans trouble me, call to all I've eaten. I've lost my appetite now, could you find it for me please, crossing against an indeterminate light in a meringue shroud. Pass on by, bon appetit. Heartburn and all that jazz, is the head free yet? Honorable Mention She walks the woods along the road, the air is cold, rain comes and goes. There at the base of the pine, a glimpse. The wait has been short or long, depends on your perception of time and its demands. That tease of white could be a scrap of birch bark, discarded paper, a patch of snow. Other ephemerals have come and gone, most too quickly, unless you watch for their bloom. Maybe these two were here yesterday, but she walked this same path, saw no signs. Perhaps the leaves were close on the ground, tiny buds still green. Today they must be taller, three leaves open, white petals curved back to drink rain.
July 2005 First Place I tried to tell you about the barbed wire man and how as a kid I was frightened of that starved hound of his, the snarl and bite of wire round the shack that he called home. You never listen when I am like this. You invent ways to compare me to a mandolin, your callused fingertips wanting to strum, to pluck my body like a string. I shake you off. The wire of my body is being stripped from the inside out. The lining of my spine heaves with nerves that are taut and frayed. I tell you I am afraid. You never believe me. Instead, your nails move back and forth across the frets of my wrist. You play chords on my arm, croon "Don't be afraid, hush." You sink into me on your couch and run me through the lush green forests of childhood. You rehearse me on your guitar, eyes half-closed against the bright summer moon. I study your arms as you play, mesmerized by the clawed fingers, the rusty glint of hair. There is a river we cross and we pull one another along through a crooked wire fence. We arrive skin on skin and only slightly torn. The wire man sleeps. We replace him with this. Second Place In Graz four newborns are found cold in a freezer. Frozen in a bucket. Blue-black under rose-garden-debris. No one is shocked. They hold out fists, point fingers, shake heads at her. Each time she birthed she despaired. Birthed. Despaired. Each time. Even the man whose wrists are red from her cinch can't remember any pregnancies. They will run tests, tie threads. Meanwhile the tenant who opened the freezer walks three miles before he finds the ice cream and relishing the taste of fresh peach in crushed pecan notes in his diary -- June 3. 'Blood hides in every apple, a moon in every blister'. Third Place It was my father who cut up her credit cards, stuffed them into the black plastic sacks along with her lipstick and Regal handbag, hefted it all out into the carport bins. On Sunday I emptied her dresser drawers. We were both guilty, startled by small sounds. One night I dreamt she returned, raging through the house. "What have you done!?" What had we done? There was no going back now. No reaching into the city dump to yank out the trash. Her things were turning and kneading at the bottom of great vats, rain soaked and loud with machinery. We had watched the loaf of her split, take in the rust and waste, roll like a seal in the bay - our muddy hands were cold for months.
August 2005 First Place Jack has this belly-button "condition." A robin-egg blue lint grows inside it. When I attempt to remove the lint, he becomes aggressive, recoils defensively. He says the doctor cut his umbilical cord wrong and there's a hole inside his belly-button exposing his organs to the air. He claims the lint is a byproduct of these organs' secretions. I never believed him. I always thought he saved the lint for his Mom, who used it to stuff her hand-made quilts. But tonight as he stood beside my chair, I looked inside his belly-button and saw a tiny heart beating. "Hold still!" I told him. The tiny heart flashed and rotated like a police light. Above it a pair of pink fuzzy handcuffs dangled from a lava lamp. I pressed my eye to Jack's belly-button and saw a room filled with confetti, plastic fruit in wooden bowls, dried sea sponges, trip wire, lobsters with rubber bands wrapped around their pinchers stacking themselves like plates inside a dishwasher, and at a cluttered desk with old chewing gum stuck to its side, a gnome swiveled in a leather chair smacking gum, blowing it, and popping huge robin-egg blue bubbles. Second Place Woody interior rotting Eases the removal of flaxen fiber. This rotting the aroma of a rat's death behind the cupboard. Women beating the ornery fannies of flax stalks. Each child to far corners, wood versus fiber, Further separation, no harmony in the roughing. How fine are you? Stay with your own kind. Parallel hackles, rough goes first Ladies last, age before beauty They are easy when wet. An orgy of women required To keep this weaver weaving. Spin, dress with sticky ooze. Thicken, strengthen before the toxin. Bleach now, sun in days gone by. Virgin white before more pummeling To close every hole. Across the pond she longs for sun. The castle madam prefers sun in Stirling. In capris, craves crisp clean air. In pedal pushers, ponders purity. Shops for vests with lungs, Trousers with bronchi Fears Chlorox And its suffocating ways. A startling oxymoron Her poisoned pants Once pummeled and putrid To her like women's lips On her cycling, climbing calves. Third Place I have a little serrated spoon hidden away in my utensil drawer you have to pick a ripe one I remember in high school home economics classes where they taught us to press our thumbs into the ends of fruit to test for ripeness every boy I've dated has wanted to squeeze my breasts sometimes when I shower I touch them myself trying to understand their globular form for breakfast mine would be nice you cut them in half with a serrated knife - not the kind with a straight edge so that you don't bruise them - ironically biting leaves marks there was a boy who so taken aback the morning after when he saw the marks he'd left he couldn't believe they'd come from his mouth I wanted to ask for more sometimes I'll have both halves of the grapefruit even though home economics would say half per person neatly cut along each segment so that each piece comes out by itself my mother had a mamogram when she was fifty five they found a lump the size of a grape - there's a fruit I don't like even if radiation and raisin are very alike she only has one breast now I see her touching herself sometimes when she thinks that she's alone or when she passes the hall mirror with only one breast she walks lopsided - my brother gave her an orange for her birthday for the other side, he said so I eat both halves with that small serrated spoon maybe I'll buy one for my mother Honorable Mention So as the honey maker stops atop the bloom for just a moment milking each drop of prism color into the nectar she will brew, so do we all alight for a sweet span between clouds to create what honey we can hanging onto our fuzzy lives in hopes of feeding those that come after us - the buzzing generations. We are such devoted fleeting thieves in search of one more petaled jewel to carry home sun light gems - we adorn crowns with flower candy for the mothers dancing home again humming between blooms.
September 2005 First Place "You deliberately eat that to bother me." Suddenly cruel I sit accused, one apple half gone in my hand, one poisonous piece a slug against my teeth. In the kitchen glass I can see myself perched gargoyl-like, I don't recognize the shadow of my hunch. I take the next bite quietly, use my tongue to press each macintosh cell to mush, suck and roll and push it down my throat half closed, unwilling. Stubborn tube. I give up, set the fruit on a plate. Let the fruit flies have it I say. Let the fruit flies take silent bites, land and lift and land. Let the plate be a silent tongue. Second Place Past fifty, and all the rosebuds gathered that will bloom for me. Tied in bunches and hung from rafters to dry, they keep their creamy pink and delicate perfume. Only the leaves are brittle, tending to dust. My back aches as I tend the autumn garden. A sentinel crow watches from the top of a lone pine. Now and again he makes an observation, a throaty "uh-oh," like an amiable warning. It is gathering time. Time to carry home the last of the flowering year: For healing, coltsfoot, feverfew and comfrey; of thyme, (which fair and tender girls must not let young men steal) enough to season winter; here's lovage yet-- but little rue; sage for longevity, and rosemary, queen of clear memory, both in abundance. That sentinel must have croaked all-clear, for now there are a dozen on the lawn-- a murder of crows, wise eyes and heavy beaks intent as surgeons, probing the earth. One turns an eye to me as if to comment, thinks better of it, rows himself into the trees. The others follow, but they don't go far. After I'm gone, they'll be here. The house is quiet now, my darlings gone, forgiven for the ways they tore my body and my heart. As night wind rises, I'll take down my mother's book of poems and read aloud to the accompaniment of rain's steel drums and autumn's wild bassoons. I'll go to bed and leave the door unlatched. We'll see what the October wind blows in. Third Place Remembrance is an empty home imbued with silent echoes that tense limbs and fill the head with the sweet salt of rhapsody The resultant glue of heat on candy and July days that swam in eternity, trees, glorious Oaks that swelled into storybook blue, and hugged, and drenched all sentient life in awe, and you, the silhouette whose calloused hands brushed away flies and fears, and the tragedy of adoption - I remember; I remember the gritty chatter of steel on crusted earth, the rows and miles of glistening green, reaching up and out to you and I, the cobbled hands who etched our spirits into a soil scarred with hoe and boot and sun - Of all the hours we shared in silence and self-containment, this fertile feast, this acre, this day of skylark notes and rippled breath stretched far beyond the tea and storms, latched doors, nightjars and nettle stings that fall into childhood's muddled rhyme - How stark the days of famine and repose that bled you to spectre gray, took away your brawny breeze and plunged you chest-deep in the muzzle of mortality; In the hollow of your silenced heart there were no flowers, but the drear scorn of squall on vanquished tumult Honorable Mention My mother, when she spoke of Tidesworth, and how all of England stopped for tea at 4:00, allowed the sun to cradle her eyes, and returned to Westminster, Munich's summer gardens, and Regensberg in early May. A nurse's cap lined tissue near old cotton-wool and cutlery, as soldiers reappeared with sunken eyes, and lungs filled to capacity. Anonymous wounds, both British and American, reopened. My mother, living inside a white house, grew gladiolus and eggplant, braided tulip stems and pressed them between her palms, hung wash in triangular fashion. She waited for afternoon to smooth into right angles and the ring doves to come full circle, reached for bone china cups with gold skirts - dotted her knuckles with Jergen's lotion, and napped on the veranda. Honorable Mention Today I watched you pick Azaleas from the nursery to be planted beneath our picture window even though, five years ago I thought of killing us both, and then you saw the snap dragons, but it is too late in the year for snap dragons. I selected the petunias with plenty of buds and few blossoms to fill the space by our front porch. Looking at each plant for a sign of vigor, just as I had once examined my own body to look for the signs of decay. I like the potential of totally green petunias, walking past them in the morning to pick up my paper, day by day, I can see them pop, one by, sometimes, one. The green and rusted cart is loaded down with colors ready to be transplanted into our nuclear family and home where once I took five showers a day and spent hours making myself vomit trying to ease the tightness in my belly. Our yard and life are lived in and comfortable. A soccer mom smiles at me as I taste the rosemary from a table filled with living herbs and I think of potting enough to keep our kitchen smelling used or maybe just so much as it takes to cover up the odor of our most unflattering fight when we told the kids about my ugly side and you said you wanted my head to explode. But soccer moms don't get to know you well enough to make educated decisions, so they smile at everyone. Begonias need a new name but you bought some for the treasure chest on the back porch where "full sun" is an understatement regardless of what your name is. I have known for years that when I died, on the front page, the second paragraph would have to say "history of mental illness" somewhere, keeping me from concentrating on the sweat that falls onto your lips and is wiped away by my favorite tongue. Unloading the car, I remembered I needed to turn the compost before it got too hot and burned out the nutrients that I work so hard to save and recycle into our yard filled with flowers and where I began to notice four years ago this spring that I could be a father and a husband and like my gardens, I needed care and you with your cotton-pink gloves covered with soil could look up from digging out the daffodil bed to move the hair sticking to your face in spring while the clouds moved in and out of our life. Honorable Mention In the old-folk's home I changed bed sheets for this white lady. She was real old, but she liked me anyway. She'd tell bout the days she was young and the things she'd done. Said she wrote for a paper back when most reporters were men. When she was ready to sleep, she'd reach up to hold my face her hands would always shake she'd pull me down to kiss my cheek. One night she said to me something like You know what little girl? I'm going to die this week. Well, I didn't know what to say, felt like a fool standing there smiling at her, too young to imagine anyone could plan for such a thing. Can't usually tell with black people till their breath comes fast and shallow. But old white folks turn blue before they die, like their tired blood stops flowing along with their will to be the last of their kind. It starts at their toes got about two weeks to live with blue toes. As the color flows up their feet they've got a week, maybe less. When it's to their knees that's the day they'll pass away. Next day when I got to her room she was lying down--I'd never seen her do that in daylight. She hadn't even pulled the covers back. Then I guess she didn't see the need to muss up the bed. She was all dressed up except that she wasn't wearing shoes. She didn't speak. That was different, she always spoke before. This time she just smiled as I came close enough to see that her feet were blue.
October 2005 First Place when we dreamed the same dream at the exact same time the face of Big Ben cracked and smiled stuffed cuckoos came unstuck exploded & flew the plank all over Harold Lloyd's latest prank, broken only by the fall of all the walls from China to Jerusalem, feathers everywhere, made real by our authentic preconscious sounds as real as red apples coming down, made to flee because of their redness, dropping from the perfect sky where you & I nibble at the common dream of skin shared, peeling away the illusions that we are somehow separate, building little love tattoos to mark the light and air and all things above the laws of gravity, (for when the world returns & oh how it always does, heavy & absurd but never quite absurd enough to remind us that we are) yours a dancing marionette, mine a string of violet, yours a Popeyed sailor man, mine a church key of oceanic proportions, opening waves & waves gathering 'round the mouth, spitting out the seeds don't doubt but the dream it is as fluid as the bed wherein we lie as changeling as the changeling sky growing growing grow! spinning whoa whoa whoa I thought I heard Tom Jones what's new pussycat whoa whoa whoa and you say Land Ho! heal me cure me heal me of this feverish love spinning up and off the curb and I say as head turns and flies your now crotchless panties in my eyes: but darling...we've both had the cure and it's marriage. Oh love, can't we be content with this transitory madness come here & stand on these pheromoneal airs with the wind & clouds & all these angel feathers swirling 'round: let Harold hang from the weight of ceremonial responsibility let the staircase burn don't try to save me take what's left of this skyscraper let the stars prance & melt in your microwave as a bum to a harlot turns your cheeks the sweetest scarlet I love it when you wear my curtains! kiss me, bite me, make your silly marks, make that chimney sweep work in the morning. Second Place This morning, the sky is Julius Caesar dressed in a policeman's uniform after his encounter with friend Brutus and the rest on the Senate floor. The maroon seepage from unnumbered slashes and cuts purples the areas around them, then finally cows the blue cloth with a smeared palette. In a defiant gasp, it dawns- he should've heeded the blind soothsayer's advice, especially after noting the mayhem spread across the sky this morning. Third Place We have four hours. He has been up since six. He is reading a novel by Steinbeck. He never keeps track of the titles. He says they remind him of unpaid bills, the jobs that changed from state to state. I am allowed two keys, my driver's license, cigarettes, loose paper money in a transparent bag, ten snapshots of the duck pond at different angles because he wants something innocuous from his past. He mentions he is eating well. He is trying to recall his dreams for an inmate who once practiced medicine illegally in another country. I hum a tune about dancing alone. I promise to be back. Here is the future on the wall: Only one hug when you first meet and one more when it is time to leave. His sentences always end with I'm sorry. I hold his hand where everyone can see it.
November 2005 First Place Sì, Artemisia, nessuno muore dalla tristezza. If we are very careful, we can make sadness last all day--push eggshell fragments against yolks with clumsy fingers, move slowly through the metered rain paced and gentle until well past noon. Sip your tea and poison slowly in a cool kitchen-tiled floors, bare feet. Drag soft hair across lips, turn down the radio to a dolorous hum. Concentrate. The sun comes to us, doesn't it? If we do not move, and only if-- If we pick up our pens, we mustn't say a thing, but rest the ink there, let it seep into paper pulp ravines. Tomorrow, maybe, it will be a poem. Sì, Artemisia, perché siamo ancora vivi. If we sleep very softly, not turning, draw the curtains against the threat of a sunny morning hopefully-- he will be there still at first particulate light-purring. Second Place Sevenling 1 His song persuades applesauce to scream, a boiling broth to quiet, and urges foes to befriend. I am a recorder for his librettos, a cathedral for his plea, and a married woman, for heaven's sake. I hope he likes red beans and rice. Sevenling 2 I carry an umbrella, a lone key and a mug crowned by coffee fog as I dash through a deluge. My entry is quick like crash-sex. The radio, defroster and wipers coo. And steam Londons over my eyes. My message needs a cell phone. Sevenling 3 You go away on big business, grizzly bear sleep, and your senate in the tool shed. But you don't come away to my occupation, loopy dreams or under my dress. In what route did we lose the plums? Sevenling 4 We went mad over lemon rice, gully cricket and Nandi Hill - were roused to form our ethnicity, drink from the other as if we were water. The air rumbled with masala, rosin, and nightly monsoons. Bangalorian Nag Champa is now a snake of ashes. Third Place For here we have no lasting city. . . . (Hebrews 13:14) We should have learned to hold life lightly here where captains' homes are crowned with widow's walks. Whalers were gone two years and more: so long to wait for news. At the river's mouth, a bronze girl stands forever, waving. The northern coastline bares its teeth; the southern shoals extend smooth arms to welcome cyclones. We glance up at the march of thunderheads. Here nothing lives beyond the reach of water and wind. Was it easier before we rode the clouds and dropped our ticking instruments to calibrate the storm? Easier to drown surprised in the house, awash with memorabilia? Is it better to take our solitary way as we do now, stitched in our skins, empty-handed, knowing what we know? Honorable Mention In Folkestone by the beach, two old hydraulic lift cars with a long reach and the rooms built into cliffs and roads that zig-zagged left to right turned stitched and switched, and something called Old High Street with a cobbled humpback and two flat drains each side looking neat as well as beat, And by the sea-front mollusced in the corner, dumped shells from the fish stall rolled within the tide stroke pull and pinch, the tide rolls take an inch, and as we left the contest band-hall, sun smote on the wave fall, dappled, looked a bit like ships or maybe France, and glittered on the instruments and glistened redly in the sky like bandsmen's bruised lips, or a dismal sigh; a sad eye; lost whist for things long missed; sea kist; or a blue sky; blue sky.
December 2005 First Place Wearing a rented tuxedo one night in Monterey, I'm sitting with my friend Jimmy on a state-of-the-art sofa stirring a cup of miso with what looks like a platinum spatula. Jimmy's girlfriend Ella lives in this fancy condo with a loft she calls an "entresol" oh my deah it's tres tres chic, you'd have to look very fah for anything like this, mon ami. The wallpaper is ramie. I guess the place is Shangri-la to her, but I could think of half a million better uses for all that dough. But well, bully for her, hooray. Not my idea of soul. Well, I sit there and console myself thinking of my old army days, especially my buddy Ray and a goodtime girl named Stella we picked up in Laredo one night--she sure was a laugh a minute, got to swinging off a chandelier and landed on the console of the Hammond organ, waving a dildo in time with--none of your smarmy dinner music, but a tarantella. Then we made a foray outside, offering stray passersby a puff of a joint, hoping they'd (Insh'Allah) sing: even with a voice only so-so one can manage a chorus of "Mammy" or caterwaul a glissando. I'll take doughty graty voices singing meaty fatty salty tunes any day over Ella's tra-la-latte. Second Place The airport wants my shoes. At last I see the trapdoor in the soles toggling down the x-ray ramp. My shapes have never shone like this. My whole life lights up in vials and doses. When I fly, I fly entire and abandoning. The animal lies down with the mineral * a leather belt curls around my mints and keys. At the threshhold, a man draws his detector down my spine, that hinge, the leash that grounds me. His convex glass magnifies my need, though he gets too close to see the blue fuse inside. He'll never leave the earth, never see the seams of an overloaded suitcase rip with wishes, rent as a lost continent. Third Place At a still damp picnic table, after the letter arrived and anger eloped with the sense of justice that came on me like a high wind of relief and left me pensive, after those went by, I daydreamed and he sat next to me, in haute couture and size 8 embroidered Turkish slippers. I knew he was an apparition of my conscience. He said he understood me. My avoidance of the horrible truth of his illness. We were in a park near a cemetery established some decades ago, with huge oaks and elms heavily dotting the slopes of monuments; death markers. I had never been there before. For years I'd wanted to speak to him; give him a call on a lonely Friday night. His silver- blues stared into my browns and I thought of our heavy coupling years back. It, of course, had begun to rain, so I walked as he slipped away into transparency. I walked among the college's libraries, the city parks, the outdoor malls, through the farmers' market, not seeing him again. When bars began asking cover charges and the streets filled with hooligans, I walked to Uptown and home, meditative, plume I was oddly relieved. And above, the sky purple-black, was not filled with stars, the city lights restrictive, but a couple of planets showed through. From what was visible of the Milky Way I'd swear I saw the slippers dancing. Honorable Mention Time, a function of old photographs and forgotten birthday cards, slows with the remembered image of each fallen tear. ...the wind outside the window rustles leaves from off the trees... If you listen long enough you can hear charged particles exceeding the speed of heartbreak. Intersecting Planes on a four dimensional model of intersecting, deconstructed globes, the light -- don't blink, darkness descends -- rapidly swirls, serpentine, into an inverted helix there are no notes to this music (And so we sat in silence together, drowning in rising waves of separateness crashing against a rock-strewn shore of abandoned promises and broken hopes -- it feels a lot like Sunday morning...) Each non-integrated mote of particulate matter rests on that razor's edge between total dissolution and tyrannical mutation when exposed to continuous streams of amplified twilight energy focused through the aperture of an obsidian lens there is no brilliance to this light Time, a Fifth Dimensionality integer of the Mandelbrot subset, shreds and rips, bleeding onto the cold, tear-spattered floor as the Heart ticks away the passing of Valentine dreams. ...the wind outside the window rustles leaves from off the trees...
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