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Winning Poems for December 2008
Judges Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald



Milk Noodle
by Greta Bolger The Waters Warmed whole milk with a pat of butter the broth, skinny noodles the substance. Our favorite lunch, made by a nearly blind grandfather for shy Heidi and bold Greta. He sat alongside us with old coffee, a heel of bread and a slice of salami, chewing softly. I can still hear him humming hymns as he washed up, hear him calling us in from play. Herein! Zeit, um zu essen! Sie Kinder haben Hunger! And it's true, we did hunger for a father more sober than his only son, for words we could easily understand, for foods we could easily digest, milk noodle, oatmeal; for his calloused hand smoothing our silky blonde heads, warm as the strange soup we slurped, foreign, yet familiar as sun. Aftermath by S. Shademan poets.org Yesterday, my blue fingers opened petal by petal. I lost my grip on the trapeze. My heart remained white squeezed, buried in the shirt drawer of a passed lover. Today, the scent of wet leaves pulled me out to the night's air. I watched a silver coin trapped in the black net of bare branches. A smile started like a fountain somewhere behind my eyes, trickled down my cheeks, spread to my lips engulfing my face. Death, who has been calling me for years, from that open space between my ribs, whose soft whispers I hear, whose curled fingers I see behind my eyes luring me in, doesn't know the day before I die I will skip through the house wearing my flannel pajamas with my dangling gold earrings. I will love every wrinkle: on my father's cheeks on my pregnancy plans and those on my lover's shirt. Momento Mori by Brenda Levy Tate Pen Shells Hold it to your ear and listen, my father said. You'll hear the sea. He offered the conch - one of a pair on the Florida souvenir counter - and I lifted it against my never-cut curls. The ocean spoke then (it must have been so, for who would doubt the word of a navy man?). Shoal-dance: hiss and boom and mutter. We claimed both pink-throated ornaments, set them beside our fireplace, where smoke bit into their soft bosses. My father dusted them often at first, then less and less. He died on a May morning. I wasn't there. Today I am in the family room, clearing my half- life rubble, those trinkets never fully paid for. My lost sailor rises from his water rest, a bubble seeking light. Hold it to your ear, he murmurs. I study the remaining shell, pitted with ash acid, patterned with worm burrows among its turrets. It looks starved. I raise it to a lobe; my gold stud presses where neck and jaw collide. Skull tectonics. What sea still moves over these old reefs and reaches? Just the eddy of my own blood - personal undertow that sluices bone - salt and iron doomed as any rotten vessel. Heaven forgive my unbelief. I strain to resurrect a single current here, flood and pull now silent beneath a nacre sunset. Invented waves dry in ruined chambers. My father retreats, a tide ebbing through his deaf labyrinth. I cannot call after him, nor even wring a prayer to wash my aragonite dead. Evening Prayer by Emily Brink The Writer's Block For years I've tackled your mountain hoping to find some bristle of truth. A crevice warm as a puppy's slick tongue. Your peak promises glory; delivers injury. I've subsisted too long on your snowmelt and yak butter diet. I have woven a coat from the strands of your hatred and the seams of your wit. Down in the village they've declared clocks useless and started evening prayer. Tibetan flags flutter in the wind like paper lamps in Santa Fe or quilts hanging on lines in a Midwestern town: it's like being everywhere at once until the prayers are done, candles snuffed. I'm just a bird changing direction, alone in mid-air.

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