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 Winning Poems from 2006 January • February • March
January 2006 First Place in a cloud of coffee i woke to the sound of rocks sleeping bats another bridge a long walk i was on the phone paying bills downtown near my old downtown where i once scribbled a particular poetry a romance between sidewalks and gum thanks for choosing sprint my boots were riverside and asked to turn south scuffing scooting for spiny garden yeah double espresso hanging in there i am swish nice to see you too a few photos later fourth and the copper high rise thereabouts breakfast was a beer and cheap lunch a few more a few friends stopped by while across the avenue roof tops were dancing in a bluebonnet sky perforated with treetops sundown a passerby selling gospel music a cure for his tired lungs on stage little people were swing dancing softly like falling water your first perfecto another missed picture better than the ones i missed of the bluesman outdoors balloons in air key lime and salt therapy the corner of fifth and somewhere something to drink one filthy one neat do you recall a lazy creek in the woods along the teeth of bluestem grass ten red eight green driveway bocce to the sounds of a new bridge and a glass into your half bottle i was flush as crushed pink granite made in texas and full as full as a tulip choked with tadpoles as that ten point meandering above the bar ranch six one six lucky stars for sale rain dancers dancing on my mother s bookshelf which appear and disappear as i write and remember i can taste the cuttlefish sashimi tofu on ice until the salt cured mountains flocks of paradise and my neighbor say welcome home my first welcome home off navy Second Place In the beginning, he is so smooth. Pristine. His problems start when he trashes all his signs except division, which he hides along his breastbone. Whipped out of a loosened Oxford at the least provocation, he divides: his day into increments, strangers into identifiable subsets, (all of which deal with threat assessment) and himself from the herd. Every evening he jots new variables onto a chalkboard. They become an equation he spends the rest of a caffeine-laced night attempting to solve--to make things add up. He awakens with erasures and no recollection of nearing a solution for his invisibility problem. The only sure things are: with every realignment of his time, other people or of his opinions, he fractures along a new axis; and, if he dares to run a thumb along any of his once-smooth surfaces, he's guaranteed a cut. Third Place Winter's tightly squared on the window. The rind of hard rain sputters over reindeers with bobbing heads. I remember watching his lips the first time: slick, like surviving ice-cubes. My tongue, my lips were unstill all night. I went home kissless. By New Year's, I knew. Today, I rub against walls to keep warm. Love is wintering. Soon we'll be an art form hanging on lines of icy banter. When the kids come, they'll expect crystal angels on the Douglas fir. I don't know if it's the eggnog, but my eyes have gotten warm. And it's really packing in now. Honorable Mention Honorable Mention
February 2006 First Place Second Place Third Place Honorable Mention Honorable Mention Honorable Mention
March 2006 First Place Second Place Third Place Honorable Mention
April 2006 First Place Second Place Third Place Honorable Mention
May 2006 First Place Second Place Third Place Honorable Mention
June 2006 First Place Second Place Third Place Finally the evening wore down to nothing. The day's heat faded into blue, and I began the postponed yardwork. I found my old lungs in the tall grasses, where I'd thrown them that bitter morning last winter. They still had a few coughs in them. I left my lemonade nearby, to dessicate and water vivid lemon thoughts. I electrified the grass in that part of the lawn with the new twirly-bladed whacker; it stood to attention before fainting dead away. I covered myself with flung tailings from that green mind, lacing seed-fronds into my long hair, a dandelion pair for earrings, and coal-black eyes made from fallen walnuts. Gradually I left myself behind; gradually I felt the greening rise, bursting through my feet as the shoe-soles wore away, climbing vine-like shins and calves and under loose jean-shorts, up under shirt, clothes gone, vine skin, green skin green muscle turn to follow sun, sex sprung vine dry nut shrivel copse, twist, turn, morning-glory rising through breast, turn, tendrils awhirl, cup behind corn-ear, shoots, wheat-teeth, grass-stem eyelash, peat-eye, green brow, vegetable gaze, all, mind knoll tree slow thought growing slow stone-slow sun turn sun follow mind gone all green white husk. druids cursed to stone
July 2006 First Place My wants are a white box full of bees. Shadows lean across the table, connecting us as we sip iced tea beneath the jacaranda's mauve arch. Peonies fall in their beds like fat drunks. We swirl our copper drinks, watch sliced lemons glide through diminishing ice. We are a pool of silence in the thrum of the garden. Beneath its plastic cover compost smoulders. I burn beneath my hat. Finally, you mention her name. A stab of sunlight glances off the row of hives against the fence. Heading back to the house, my feet sense the roll of fattened worms beneath black soil. At night, I leave our bed and step through the bruised light that fills our room. Viewed from above, with my fingers pressed against the window, the lines of the garden are etched across an old man's face. Second Place Cesar Pasquel stopped using words one day. He removed them from his vocabulary, aardvark to zygote, one by one until there were none. Gestures went next. No waves goodbye, no shrugs, no handshakes. Slumped shoulders and downcast eyes became status quo. Cesar cut off his left foot one idle Tuesday, and then the right. He cooked them over a spit, ate them with a side of regret and solitude. The legs went Wednesday, then his torso, then the arms. Soon he was a severed head with two perfect hands hovering nearby, marred only by neglect. The last time I saw Cesar he picked up his head and set it in the middle of his kitchen table, a centerpiece of sunken eyes and hanging jowels. He closed his eyes, a sigh barely audible from his dry, cracked lips. We passed the wine and bread without looking. Third Place The children suffered most, as always. Suddenly no one understood what it was with such wide-open heart to love the world-- to roll in rotting leaves, smile up at the rain and lunge to savor any crumb that fell. None but the saints, and of those there were so few. Rain fell twelve nights and days. When the sky cleared, only the astronomers knew at first what it meant, that great hole in the southern sky. Alnilam, Alnitak, Nair al Saif, Muliphen, Adara, Procyon, Sirius ... all gone, all gone forever: the weeping Hunter gone to seek his companions. God, with no anagram, turned his face to the wall. Even the cats were stunned: We did not want this, we didn't want this at all. Honorable Mention Lightning started a fire one day. It protruded orange lilies in the blackest gulf of the sky. Out there where no one knew where I was. Running along the side of the potholes on our unnamed street, trying to make it home before my mother. Eventually the sparks ignited an old boat and it burned and shuddered against the wind. The sledgehammers flew past me then. The beauty of horror becoming miscellaneous. Brown haired and stone-souled I stood in the background nursing my own flames. My mother going up and down the stairs that so carefully calculated a path towards a beaten white door. Sledgehammers were there. They flew with the wind. My father stood in amazement, untouched. His hand on his beer; blue cynical eyes on the flame. My sister so tall then fiercely her face lit up in reverie of some past haunting. For days they told the story. Each one different from the other, each one never knowing I was there. Honorable Mention The strange bruises, the night sweats, the pulse galloping at the neck, the swelling, the flesh peeling off like lemon rind are all just side effects. Miltown, mistaken at first for a place; and so it is; as are all altered states of the heart and mind. So they lie in a dead woman's bed ignoring the color of the morning sky, taking no heed of its warning. They are already lost at sea. This voyage is long; their voyage, longing. The ball finials gleam like doorknobs. The magnolia's bittersweet scent gives a hint of where they are or should be. Nothing ever grows beneath that giant tree outside the window. He claims to have held her all night long but how would she know? Lost in rambling dreams, anything is possible. And as impossible as a woman's spine. She faces the wall clinging to a pillow as if it were her unborn child or a man she once loved too much. If he holds his breath, he can almost hear the collapse as the old leaves decompose. He can almost hear the far-off waves lap. Honorable Mention for Miklos Radnoti 1909-1944 Darkness smoothes the barbed wire of the camp on a night without sleep without word of the world he writes wakeful in the electrical pause charged with knowing For surely he knows as he writes the words "dearest" and "beautiful liberator" the page is pallid in the shifting light "Do you see?" he writes his body into being his salvaged book as the march is forced to its faceless conclusion. Honorable Mention There's a devil song coming in from the west, on a plane, on a wind, like a hitch hiker, like a hornet on your sleeve. All the skies tell the same story. All the flags fly half-mast. You're playing your flute but softly. And yesterday I counted in threes. I signed over the copper and glass lantern and our favorite gold rings. Something awful travels, and something finds lips for its string. Dust collects under my once crimson nails, and blood settles south. Air from the north like little apocalypses sneak in from under the doors, and soothsayers tisk-tisk to me in my dreams. All of it, I dream it. So I carve your name two dozen times onto two dozen apples, and I stretch out long like their long necks, and I feed them, the swans, I feed them. And in their elegant whiteness, they sing. The birds, too beautiful to be birds, sing.
August 2006 First Place After the test, I waited and thought of its cold hug under the shoulders, its weight on the chest, blackness packing the mouth, the nose, the eyes. When the call came, I went out and knelt in the dirt, watching the worms and pillbugs work leaf-decay to loam. I lifted a handful, smelled green earth and thought how hard seed-coats crack in rain, how root-hairs uncurl, blind and sure of finding. Dirt clung to my hands as I rose and let go a shower of clods that hit my boots with soft thuds and broke into pieces all I have yet to become. Second Place You are the drum that beats inside my chest; you are the harvest taken in too soon, the boat that sank before it came to rest. You are the harvest taken in too soon and I the farmer grieving for his fields whirled in the brassy hurricane of noon. Now grieving like a farmer for his fields I pace the empty storerooms yet again and weigh in handfuls what the ruin yields. The empty storerooms echo yet again to heavy steps that beat like thunder on the shipwrecked harvest, crushed in hail and rain. Thunder with sodden steps beats dully on, but you are the drum that pounds inside my chest, the sailor sunk and drowned, the harvest gone. Third Place She called to say she was wiping the jam off the handle of the fridge this morning when she realized that hundreds of kisses lay like confetti on the floor, dying. She realized she had inadvertently stepped on one or two, maybe more. I could see her pulling her hair back, carefully kneeling so not to injure more. picking them up, one by one, not even the pressure of a fingerprint, then realizing they had been purposely thrown there, and that none were missing. Honorable Mention The extent to which the book extends is bound within its cover and stretches through the vaunted halls of mind cathedrals in signs and codes. The book whose spine follows the circle of library walls is God - according to Borges - and spins circles through space. The space between books on shelves in the library, any library at any time, remains a universal constant over which a librarian has no control. This page, a leaf that turns through cycles. These letters, catalogue of scrawl on the toilet wall by those who seek light as they travel down rows of shelves, neatly filed volumes dissolving into atoms of information transmogrified, transmittable via brainwaves anatomical cables bridge print to thought. A conversation with God, with gods of words in ceremonial procession covering page after page, alphabetically, systematically coordinated page and word. Titles by authors long dead, the scarecrow straw and stuff of their heads. 'Oh time thy pyramids, thy labyrinth of letters' how we scramble and climb through their thorns and dust for meaning and find only the beauty of symbols, a simulacrum of beauty. We search now for alternatives through spaces, silences, the narratives unwritten. How long have we stumbled uncomprehending, and who writes the findings of the search, the narratives of the searchers? Is there, somewhere, a writer penning in slanted gold calligraphy ... 'In the beginning the word was ...' Honorable Mention My mother would play Hank Williams sometimes and beg the men at the bar to dance the Two Step or some old-fashioned reel I barely knew. I was six. I would think of my father coming home with his empty thermos and us not there again. I had a stomach full of fear, glasses shattering as his hand would clear the table from the night before. I'd plead with the bartender through eyes like globed fruit. My mother would say I was shy and they'd poke bony fingers at me. If one pulled me on his lap while my mother danced, I'd smell the stale sweat and beer. I thought of my father hanging damp laundry on the line, stirring up a black cast iron skillet of potatoes. On the slick wood there was a small bowl of salt. I'd play with it, write Daddy, or a draw a heart and our initials. I promised when I was older I'd steal away with him to Mexico. Honorable Mention The messages come thick and fast--like Joan of Arc with her Saints Margaret and Catherine and Michael, his spirit-guides provide him clear instruction: their disciple, he turns left or right--away from dark (he says) towards light. Perhaps it is projection but it gives him some assurance of protection--for a moment he is safe. I can't assess this as pathology: it seems to me an absolutely viable response to feeling spiritually chafed--ripped raw. Dumped into the depths of the abyss you will do anything to promulgate at least the fleeting sense of some experience of bliss: that is the law. I sit here knowing nothing but that it is human to resist the sucking maw that wants to swallow him. I only wonder that I haven't followed him. Honorable Mention There comes a time to let go, though there is nothing tangible like a surge of sunflowers to be found. It is an unexpected feeling hidden in a tidy space: a sunspot perched on your collarbone. Yeah--you circled the lip of brilliant flames, but you must release what you won't call love. It might alert and harm the ones you look after. Dumb smiles and elegant conversations were the closest you came to colliding. You mourn during rush-hour; when the market's breadfruit can't handle your finger's crush. While there's no body of physical work with a start, middle or end, you bury what you have.
September 2006 First Place Der Apfel fallt nicht weit vom Stamm.
German Proverb
I have worn you, a white chemise against
my numbness, when I lie down at night.
I am so bright in these dark hours, moths
hover over me, little ghosts attracted
to my shine. Daddy, you were mine.
I leave you. I leave the country, arrogant
in its stupidity, to rub pages of poems--
I inflame, a spark against a vein, I stumble
on cobblestones, long before I lose feeling
in my feet. In vineyards, I set fire to your picture,
watch your ears curl, your mouth, too full of noise.
I have chanted Dante Alighieri and watched us
become soot. There are Polish towns where peasants
wring out nappies. When I ask you where you came
from you don't know, but I think you were
born on the barn, like the Luna moth that hatched.
How green you glow against the red wood.
You enter my ears at night. Luminous engine,
you work and work and work. Arbeit
Macht Frei, you and I are a country
of farmers and serfs. I sop up your blood
with the brown bread my husband has baked
in his oven. You will fly back to me, sooty spirit
with green wings, eyes of a man of Arles.
Another circumstance, another year of wintering,
as I am summering now. Daddy, soon you will be
in a place I cannot touch. In Donegal, it is already night,
and I let the loose soil of us sift through my fingers.
All fathers tell lies, all writers are liars.
And at Yeats' grave, in the mossy town of Sligo,
cats stalk moths under a host of silver apples.
Second Place Indolent dust drifts over the roofs and drains of my city. Barber shops and a lip of rose water, soiled boxes stacked with rendered fruit, faraway, the chug-chug of a bus leaning forward like an animal hunting water. Mumbai half shut down, alcoves falling into darkness. One electric bulb coming on in a rooming house, heat resting in hallways and squalid yellow rooms. Your suitcase carried away beyond the dry hydrant. A forgotten lipstick tube opened and never closed. Our bed against the window, draped mosquito netting, your discarded slippers gold as aquarium fish. The language of your underpants cater-cornered in a drawer, your forgotten bra hanging on a hook. Your eyes looking over the androgynous city for rain, monsoon held in abeyance beyond the Western Ghats. Your red lips flung like coins into the face of a beggar. Third Place A baby cries like a tail-pulled cat across the alley, louder than the hip- hop pumping from the parking lot where a car rattles with its pulse. In the kitchen, a tea-pot boils a whistle over the television's monologue: airport check-points, gridlock on the turnpike. At the dining room table, checkers clack, two girls argue over kings, ask rhetorically Why can't they shut that goddamn baby up? Half-lotused in the bedroom, I listen: blood drums in the ears, air whispers through the fine hairs of the nose -- I try to rise into the same silence that hangs between stars, inviolate over the dark song of the city. Honorable Mention He had a pauper's funeral county-paid space near the mass grave of floral tributes. Natty and well-liked back in the day, he was knifed in his driveway. Steel-toed boots shattered orbits spit teeth a bullet pierced lung-- He should have struck his tent wandered with the exodus-- (California, Carolina) people who loved his pacific kitchen table where dense minds might grasp tall words and imaginings beyond grain elevators, coke ovens, Chevrolet. Change, he resisted still weeding his patch preaching sunrise amid decay and wolves who marked their territory. Honorable Mention One summer I kept the watergrass down with nerve gas in Afghanistan, CIA assassins in Nicaragua, Hooker Chemicals in Love Canal. I spread climbing interest rates in the onion rows. The pope's trip to Africa protected the eggplants. Large, well-placed rocks held old election results against the wind, blocking the bindweed before it could entwine the melons. I spread hostages on the ground, the Klan's murders and Kissinger's lies. The spew of St. Helen's and riots in Miami kept the chokegrass out of the squash. As things got worse, my garden prospered. Now, years later, I have stopped planting, and newspapers accumulate in every room. Stacks that started in corners and against blank walls soon will climb over the windows, crowd the doors, and I'll wait in the dark till my hair stops growing and my eyesight dims and I no longer hear the thud of the morning's news as it lands on the porch of another day. Honorable Mention Stretched out upon warm silver sands, I trace the outlines of an ammonite: long dead these dreams of when my fingers touched your face, an image that my mind cannot erase. I constantly re-run the things we said, stretched out upon warm silver sands. I trace each moment back, and try to find the place where smiles grew faint, and tears began to shred these dreams of when my fingers touched... Your face distraught, you spurned my offer of embrace, and left. I've been alone now since you fled, stretched out upon warm silver sands. I trace your footsteps as you ran away, a race to try and clear such pictures from your head: these dreams of when my fingers touched your face. I must accept my fate with all due grace, forget the past, and just move on. Instead, stretched out upon warm silver sands, I trace these dreams of when my fingers touched your face. Honorable Mention I have to do this. I have to remember to smile through sweat and caffeine; to keep my legs crossed on the days I wear a skirt. This is what I've never told. The story of undocumented virginity; edited emotion; checked boxes along the right side of the page. Being bare, I can sleep inside that rich smell. Sea foam and red tide emerge to conceive clay mounds. Every pull I spray myself with the ocean's salted perfume. Tendencies of wanting to be with you always in the hours and swells to come. You came to me. my apartment 9 am. You must have smelled me through the door I guess I should not have worn that skirt. There is nothing that can protect. Nothing.
October 2006 First Place (for Fred Tarr and the Radio Room) The love affair with stangers began with morning glories between us, Bob went to work at the prison at 6:30 as the birds performed their last songs. He quieted Sarge, Berry and Coco with biscuits before he left with his radio on, yet they started barking before he reached the first stop sign. I want to be his wife forever they thought, I thought and we kept barking, as we chased his car for all time in our minds. Bob talks to his ex 1500 minutes a month, he doesn't seem to mind the cost of his past tense. Why didn't you just stay married? I am pretty too behind this fence made of chain-mail. Twenty-one years is all he says from the screened-in back porch where he keeps his old partners, ex-police dogs, his detritus. It is as if 21 years is the official Americana. There must be one hundred morning glories from me to Bob, outflanking the trees choking them slowly. Bob wants me to be his wife forever, waiting in my war torn house next door so he can get home from prison to say goodnight and wake up again to say good morning all over. I am the last sweetheart in town. Second Place The figs. I had to see if the figs were safe. Without them we would have nothing to sell or trade, only some dried tomatoes and hard raisins. The smoke from the trucks and tanks was no different than the dust and sand that filled our mouths every day. The sound of the planes like the scream of hot wind. The bombs could have been thunder. I was eight and knew I could save the trees from the madness. Thank God, oh thank God the French and British did not want figs. I held my arms out, protected the grove as they drove by looking for men and boys to catch. Maybe to shoot. When I ran down the hill my grandfather, father and uncle were squatting in the chicken pen. The French wanted to kill them. Lana, our Christian neighbor, whispered a breeze of soft words through their thick forest of guns. A captain flicked his cigarette at our brave men, then the soldiers left. My uncle smoked the rest of it. I saved the figs. Lana saved our men. Third Place The Lord told me, "Raise a children's army." So I formed the Lord's Resistance to fight the oppressors in Kampala. My boys burned village huts, killed, cut off people's ears and lips, -- now their mouths stay open, the better to pray and their ears strain to hear the Lord's words. Some ask why we did all these things. Why does a leaf fall? Is it not because God wills it? When my children pounded babies in wooden mortars, dare you question it was the Lord's request to me? Now some name Joseph Kony a war criminal. Yet, the way of my people, the Acholi, is to forgive, to invite all to the mataput, to share a roasted sheep. I will quit the jungle with my sixty wives for nothing less than full amnesty, the shared meal. I will emerge from the jungle shadows, an old lion bringing the wisdom of my Lord God to the young lions to tell them to let the holy oils annoint them, a stone sewn into their garments so a mountain projects to shield them and all bullets bounce off. And I will sing in praise of the Lord of the limping and the lost, Lord of the empty basket, of the water turned to blood, of the severed lips and ears - the butchered lamb at the feast. Honorable Mention Under the remains of honey daylight, cut to stripes by white plantation blinds, I sit at your desk, wrapped in my it voice, scribbling my best guess of why pumpkins are gobbled mostly in the fall. I plan to leave the theory in your notebook: but it's absurd, and we've had enough of that. I throw my head back so that my chin points straight ahead-- swallow hard, shoving unfettered thoughts down my throat. I want to roll my corners out like this colorful Persian rug you love, but I'm being pulled from under you while words hash to dust. And you need protocols for the future like a tin full of leftover screws. Honorable Mention The Bering Straits were especially cruel that year. The Anacortes fleet lost two crab boats. In Friday Harbor it never quit raining. The paper always had suicides. That was the year Scoop Jackson quietly died. She kept the nightstand full of prescription bottles. Her hands never touched the Earth. No plants grown, no digging in a garden. Occasionally, a glass needed washing. The mill's Black Liquor ate up the soles of my boots. Lummi Indians unloaded the green chain of the sawmill. Ten hours lifting 4 by 6's and 2 by 4's makes you strong or breaks you down. No in betweens. Nothing grey, but the fog. The sound of Navy jets doing touch and go's. A hotdog pilot flew under Deception Pass Bridge and took out the phones. The steer jumps the fence even with the tire around the neck. Back then the island was covered with Sitka Spruce. You could drive to the top of Mt. Erie and it seemed the whole Sound was in front of you, except Seattle. Northern Lights kept the path to the barn. I hear she's back in Tucson and went into treatment after her last boyfriend died on her kitchen floor from a hot shot. Her son's in a rock and roll band. I'm here, still wet and shivering.
November 2006 First Place Art is the taste of wild buttercup petals. Before too long you'll be forbidden to eat them. Christ is a god wrapped in gauze, draped in flaws. Sometimes religion seeps through. Elephants wrinkle with the flow of the hunt: Faith is a great ear flapping, unflappable. Gender will press you to pick from a tree. Hew to the orchard, and carry no axe. Illusion finds depth in a shallow pool; Justice is a lung exploding at the surface. Kinetic fingers learn best in a cage: Locks can't resist an energetic tickle. Maybe you'll think I am crazy today-- No matter. Tomorrow is what I address --or what I expect, guard against, will back. Politeness is listening, unwilling, to me. Quality hides in a prospector's pan. Removed from the gold, it relaxes to earth. Savannahs exhale, continental and dusty, tarantulas sigh as one with the tigers. Uniqueness is all I will ask of you. Validity answers its own pale questions. While preachers and prophets would never admit it, X marks the spot where their sins become yours. Youth is too new for a language of nuance, Zero too old for the logic of grownups. Second Place 1. In my dark infancy are rooms of infra-red, blankets of sound-proofing that hide an infant's cry. Inside asbestos skin, I hear blood pulse through my temples like heated air through stainless ductwork, the whir of advancing film inside my camera skull. I dig blood-rusted nails into my ear canal, scrape the grit of scabs, try to free myself from the deep noise--like ants in their burrows. 2. I followed him to Idaho, found another job cutting hair. He drove me out into the wilderness, one of the places at the ends of gravel, lays me on the hood of the car. Afterwards, all I remembered was the river hiss, the rush of blood between wooded banks. It was a long walk back. 3. It doesn't take this one long before a lean of the shoulder into my breast, the shift of an elbow grazes my crotch. They all think they can hide under the cape as I snip away at their hair. Close below his very clean ear (some ears are like old snot rags), I concentrate on the slight movement of the artery, a tube of spit, sausage of sewage, exhaust fumes trapped in a wine bottle, tornado of voices screaming to get out. I want to take these scissors, and dig out the sound, the ear wax, break it free of the darkroom, expose the negative, become the photograph. He leaves me a twenty dollar tip. Third Place A. Of, at, relating to, or forming a limit, boundary, extremity, or end. Botany: Growing or appearing at the end of a stem, branch, stalk, or similar part. Coffee in plastic cups has an air of despair about it. Tea even worse. The walk back from the machine down the corridor was endless. The doctor seems efficient, if a little weary. Maybe he's got it completely wrong. Maybe he's got the wrong file. It happens. B. Electricity. A position in a circuit or device at which a connection is normally established or broken. The fridge still makes the same sound. Its existence seems pointless. What's the use of food now? Why would anyone want the rough pate and the soft cheese, all the way from Lille, hidden in the fridge's belly? It won't do any good. What's the future of that bottle of Moet? C. An ornamental figure or object placed at the end of a larger structure; a finial. The ring symbolising eternity was a good concept, but unworkable, on this planet, anyway. "Please can we have a ring symbolizing 6 to 8 months?" D. A passive conductor at such a position used to facilitate the connection. We'll have to make an appointment about Pain Management, it's a different department. There's no need to talk to the surgeon, there's nothing he can do. E. A town at the end of a transportation line. I pass someone in the street, a neighbour, we say good morning. And I'm thinking he doesn't know. He doesn't know. But I know everything has changed. Even the way I put on my socks tomorrow, will be different. F. A device, often equipped with a keyboard and a video display, through which data or information can be entered or displayed. Hey, you're one in 10,000, girl. I always knew you were special. Apparently the 'median' is 6 months. So the doctor was being on the generous side. He could still be wrong. (Please.) G. Of, relating to, occurring at, or being the end of a section or series; final. Causing, ending in, or approaching death; fatal. Christmas is new landmark for us. It will either be our last together, or my first alone. Pain management, either way. We have to make ourselves think about these things. Does one send cards? Shall we do it ahead, just in case? Honorable Mention At three, he was my boy by the runoff creek. Knee to cheek, toe-digging mud deep, dipping fish bowls full, bare feet in shreds aside the plow-sharp turn of good dirt, the near, round trees. Mid-youth, stories, fake new men, blue, dark, blonde, flimsy cons, dealers, painters, sorry dreams of slow dancing, thin air. None, close, knew, right, me. Men, then of real build, chin, cheated, smacked, dragged, bruised, blacked my eye, sat while I called cops, ran. I pulled my cool stuff to curb, broke pots, my savings, my tries, to chips. Now I summon gestures, silky dark candlelit conjunction. It's like they dream me, slight, or fine, tall, full, flash red, slash sweet and move through me, through me, fine kiss, through me. Honorable Mention There is that singular moment only whispered to one's self- when evening has carved a notch in this small corner where one secretly breathes. A flash of light on grass grown up to the hips; gnarled cedar, swimming with fire ants: Something acidic gathers in the back of the throat. Hidden forms only the night and one other creature might know begin to bleed that black putrid sauce. The smell is familiar: Someone's Father had the same aroma when his eyes finally settled on the ceiling. Now it's time to crawl through the grass and wait for the sun. The trackers will see the steam from the body long before the dogs begin to howl. Honorable Mention You, Canadian? The greatest American? You fought to be neither, but nor were you panther that crouches in wait. You were egret, your feet in the mud as you stood above weeds. Both your fathers would leave you to war. Meeting you, Isaac Brock would say: "Here is a man!" Sure as apple trees bud, the pleas of a peacemaker can't be imparted while even your traplines have got to be guarded. Time was gravity as shooting stars descended. Time was charity and at the Thames it ended. The cities were the bellows of the wind that blew at Prophetstown, across the rivers, over you. Gray wolves surround the egret. Foxes slink away, their coats the colour of your blood. You'd say: "Sing your death song and then die like a hero returning home." Yours was the song of that egret, your life like a burning poem.
December 2006 First Place A handkerchief is not an emotional hold-all. A cup of tea does not eradicate all-smothering sensations. A hands-on approach is not the same as a hand-on-a-shoulder willing a chin to lift and an upper lip to stiffen. A forehead resting on fingers does not imply that the grains of sand in an hourglass have filtered through. A set of eyes staring into space is not an indictment that the sun came crashing down in the middle of the night. A sigh that causes trembling and wobbly knees should be henceforth and without warning trapped in a bell jar and retrained to come out tinkling ivories with every gasp. A poem trying to turn a sad feeling on its head does not constitute a real poem, it is a can-can poem dancing on a pin-head and walking a tight-rope with arms pressed tightly by its sides. Second Place In the unmade bed, she had no legs. The fruit that her mouth coveted was bruised, the milk in the dark refrigerator, watery and blue, the bowl in the barren cupboard, cracked and empty. Her legs were watery and blue, her mouth unmade and bruised. She was dark and cracked and empty. She was covetous and blue. She was barren. She had no fruit. She was a cupboard, a bowl, a refrigerator that could not be filled. She was a bed no body slept in. The leash waited, coiled in the dim hall. The dog was dead, the birches, bark peeling, bent; the hill she once scaled, slippery. She was the dimness, the coil, the wait. She was the peeling and the impossible ascent. The dog was dad; she had no legs. The dad was dead. She was unmade. Third Place Her body is crumpled plastic laid flat, complexion waxy. Crow's feet mark the tendencies of her nature. Her grandson, my ward, tells me of milk and cookies, the simple tenets she upheld, unquestioned kindnesses. He wrote a poem about it Mom will read in eulogy. We meet the rest outside, who greet each other (hard-shelled and sentimental alike) in the camaraderie of grief. This child, who has shown younger cousins who is boss by stripping their underwear and ignoring their pleas, is a puffy-eyed prize in the open arms of his mother. "My oldest (of eight)," she beams to obscure relatives. The uncle auctions salvaged cars. Knuckles having earned their gold, he asks questions as one acquainted with the ease of plain answers. He offers money because "he's a good kid at heart, always the first to help out." I can't tell him how the boy put his hands around their necks and threatened to kill them if they told. Instead, I note more auspicious behavior, for the man expects to run the value of therapy through his calloused fingers and know the knot will hold. I cannot tell him that no boy is a convertible. That if a dent could be smoothed, another is bound to surface; that where I work, no one is ever fixed. Honorable Mention September came like winter's ailing child but left us viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every doctored moment lied. You lie with orphans' parents, long reviled. As close as coppers, yellow beans still line Mapocho's banks. It leads them to the sea; entwined on rocks and saplings, each new vine recalls that dawn in 1973 when every choking, bastard weed grew wild. Honorable Mention There is small art in solitude. It shakes sometimes like random shock, as though one spot explains the arc or one fine point defines the line. There is no talk when none's received, when simple converse meets no mark, as though the circle rolls the ball, as though the line supports the box. There is no black like night assigned to pounding chest and clenched, cold heart, as though the sphere explains the sky, as though void space can break the fall, when locking shut in one timeframe, some voodoo shimmies out one name. Honorable Mention I liked to jog to the pier my one day off and have breakfast, gazing at an ocean through salt stained windows. There was a bar nearby, mainly deserted in the off season and I'd stop in, enjoy a brewski, flirt a little with the waitress there; she loved to draw my attention to the rare big busted patron and ask me if I knew how they got that way. On the slow walk back to my summer rate motel, I skirted water's edge and wondered just how long that little sandpiper with the one leg was going to last.
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