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Winning Poems for March 2003
Judge Mark Yakich
Passenger Side
Dana Elaine Carr
So much more patient with intricacy,
even than in my youth,
when I won a reputation for complicating
anything I touched,
I gather the details of every landscape,
the flakes of paint on every abandoned barn,
the sculpture of each weed that grows
in the roadside ditch,
the precise way the tear in the banner
shows the sky, sings with the wind,
fading billboards with puzzling messages
about agricultural lubricants and God,
and signs offering bulbs free
to those who will plant them in hope.
Flesh, Blood and Dimension
by Mary Prenosil
why you punish me?
Tic tock, goddamn clock - make it stop.
Flesh, blood and dimension:
absurd restraint, dainty comments flutter
fine tea china constraint
savin' it all up for sunday
mass relieved 98% of the mafia
black threaded, beaded --
led through the e-zine, bored
yet note that this round is completed.
there's things the butcher said to mamma'
room temp converts circus freaks
to petrified wood.
not standing or sitting 'round rotund proverbs
So this is the life?
So that is your love?
Sew this mouth shut when truth multiplies multitudes ignorance --
first, they come for second tries.
Nah. Nope. bit of brazen clique, ya stutter
door jammed up with your foot that kindly felt out
our lips.
Flesh, blood and dimension
*yawns*
Ain't no good for ya' here, little girl. Go on -- git
trailers and wagons is comin'
you don' wanna' be next
number in line is 42.
fingers gnaw fancy black keys
feign a little interest at the left bank backlash
-they've served the best-
gods dropped to their knees when she knocked
god's dropped the children
when mamma said ain't no good goin' back.
giddyup, git along
spur your stallion
-sing alone-
The Road
Melissa Resch
A pilgrim loves the road.
Or rail.
She thinks the train more romantic.
The swing and click spills stories
From a lonely widow about the old days in a kibbutz.
The clack sways theories
Within hours the universe is settled.
Nowhere to be but here,
Till shes there.
Then its one foot before the other to
Learn the secrets
Of gondolas that skim canals,
Castles that stand firm on windy moors,
Birthplaces of voices like Dickens and Mozart.
Turbulence rises, though,
It bubbles up a deeper secret;
That mankind is often unkind.
Within wire fences of a puzzling locale
Such as Dachau,
Electrified by her own terror,
She laid to rest her pure trust in goodness.
On the trail again,
When confusion of conundrums
Steal sleep and borrow time,
Some bit of beauty pierces clarity into reality.
Maps are unfolded,
Destinations chosen,
A new journey is begun with wide eyes and curious strains
To seek secrets that please a pilgrim.
Albumin
by TE Ballard
I think of an egg. A loonνs offering
tied to the center of my breasts
like the eye of a Cyclops. Always seeing,
always looking somewhere. It is this egg I think of,
carried the summer I was ten
with ten thousand others buried deep
in the pockets of my ovaries, waiting.
Waiting like a child for a bird to fly out of her chest;
a gryphon, a phoenix or some other
magical beast. These are the things I remember; this
and the sour smell of my shirt
after possibility had died. How I drew
the needle across the center
and poked a hole, blew out the placenta
like the tongue of a lizard
and the clear line which held death.
I painted the white shell in blue, then red
drew small flowers, tied their stems
into intricate patterns, carefully,
in case I was wrong.
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