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Winning Poems for January 2009
Judge Elena Karina Byrne



New Neighbors
by Eric Rhohenstein criticalpoet.org Yellow jackets ascend like mortar fire from the cherry’s split trunk. Spikes of fennel rise in the side yard, where the garden was before the old man died; his grandson somersaults through a choke of new clover. The day is dry; I should be cutting lawn. squirrel at the birdfeeder ground-skirt of grackles the village the village! fire alarm hum crescendo, and again Much like autumn wind: product of a gavel falling. (Soon enough, the cherry’s branches set against a winter skin of sky) Boy, do you hear the pop songs aging, aging from kitchen windows? (Across Erie, the edge of Canada erupting from spring lake-mist) Some things are broken before they’re ever bent, but only some. (One day, the summery inside of a woman) hay-rolls at the velvet edge of vision sunrise sunset and how it goes, and how it went. As if this was the start of anything; it’s only a lion’s mouth grown wider, wider, roaring. Much like your mother’s: the logic of donning play-clothes, of not missing dinner. farmers’ daughters fatten up we sons of nothing much the village cream is drawn cup by cup make whey! make whey! Afternoon dogs sing the pressure of dawn. First Frost by Christopher T. George FreeWrights Peer Review A last ochre magnolia leaf twitches like the index finger of a dying man; under the ginkgo, yellow leaves spread & all the birds are in motion, swooping, diving: robins, starlings, cardinals, a brace of cheeky blue jays—o one vaults into the magnolia like a trapeze artiste and devours a bud. Dinner With the Ghost of Rilke by Laurie Byro Desert Moon Review Come here, to the candlelight. I’m not afraid to look on the dead. I was confused by snakes looping around your neck, the little girl voice that you had to swallow in order to please your mother. I told you as you twirled a red flag to draw away the slathering wolves that you would never disappoint me. The crumbling bridge where we said our goodbyes all those years ago must even now contain the echoes of our voices sleeping in its seams. How many inexhaustible nights did I stay awake to answer your letters? You asked me to steal something risky, something I couldn’t take back across the street. Greedy for praise I filled my pockets with sugar. Outside the café the night becomes a snow globe. Held in your gaze, winter takes me back. Taste Buds of Children and Mock Adults by Thane Zander Blueline We bleed on pavements decorated in childish flowers, discharge our vehemence in toilet bowls swallowing large tracts of shit, shyte, shovel it out and spread onto a garden decorated with summers hues, placate the dandelion as it swims aloft on wispy winds, seeking Monarch Butterflies to caress in death throes, excrete your discontentment on the laps of executives when the family savings invested in stocks, tumble like a dryer on spin cycle, the cold cycle reserved for her husbands dying corduroys, the colour sticking to off white socks and travel brochures from a back pocket, ready to fly first class with crumpled shirts and dungarees wearing thin around the butt, years of sitting at a computer and conversing to faceless names, except the ones that lie when they post an avatar of indifference and cheek, swallow the last Rhubarb sandwich on a plate filled with regret and woes leftover like a dying man's left testicle after an operation to cure the cancer of his family passed down to him, his brother long dead and buried in another garden setting, flowers in pots and agee jars no lid required, the dried arrangement last longer in summer's sun, We eat curdled milk, drink dipped honey crusties, pass the jam so youngun's can leave a bloody trail on the white tablecloth, and the ants and bees can leave a tell tale sign of their visit, my wife said she could smell ants, me; I avoid bees like the plague. Talking Terror by Sachi Nag The Writer's Block On our way to Fundy City in ten inches of snow, a familiar cab driver asked me if I lost anyone in those sixty hours of Mumbai. We couldn’t take our eyes off the Christmas lights, and the carols on the airwaves, so haunting, we were feeling kinship in the gravy of victimhood, when the hardened ice beneath the slush stunned the front tyres, and we skidded rear-ending a parked van and spun over the edge into a pile of snow from last year. Strangers stopped by with shovels and hooks, powering us out. We dusted jackets, shook hands; restarted, slow, almost like roadkill, eyes riveted along the routine way - now as sinuous as a strange white feathered boa - the cabbie's sure hands shaking at the wheel.

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