Winning Poems for March 2008
Judge Fleda Brown

Carol for the Brokenhearted
by Brenda Levy Tate
Criticalpoet.org

Can you hear the whole sky ringing? 
I watch you stumble under its alleluia bell. 
Your bare feet string a dozen prints 
like pearls across the December grass. 

These soles are your only stars, girl. 
Hours, days, years - every last wound 
you'll ever endure - catch in the silty net 
you drag behind, sans mermaids, moths 

or seraphs' teeth. Your uncombed dreams 
pour down your face, white as salt. 
Listen, the sea is shifting in sleep. 
It's Christmas, and you are unparented 

again. We both wait in this empty inn-yard; 
a few stray gods quarrel behind their curtain. 
Since they have been replaced, no doubt 
they can discount one more failed prayer, 

one more gloria in excelsis. A feather zags 
its way to earth. This is only an owl's trick, 
girl. If you pick it up, you will be lost. 
Can't you feel the darkness gathering itself? 

Midnight snaps shut, a padlock against hope. 
Tomorrow is ordinary, as you must surely 
expect by this time. Come into the pub-light 
where a solitary barman offers decent ale 

and music for all the bruised people. We are 
among them, we whose homes and lovers 
have blown like scarves over the world's edge. 
Here's to absent friends, someone says. 

I lift a mug; foam spatters my right hand. 
A nearby church peals one o'clock and I 
almost believe in something. Then I look down 
at the tabletop reflecting your face. Its eyes 

turn to knotholes, beaten into the wood. 
Its mouth is the crack under a door. 
You've damned me, girl, with a feather 
saved from dirt. Now you wear it in your hair.


Bitch
by Carla Martin-Wood
Criticalpoet.org

Whatever poison runs through the veins of wolves 
that draws them to some solitary place, 
there to howl in altercation 
with the moon, 
runs burning through my veins tonight, 
and restless, 
sweating, 
I rise and pace 
this carpeted wilderness, 
these rooms grown strange. 

How many times have we mated 
on nights like this, 
rain beating 
like the frantic hands of a jealous wife 
against the windows? 
How many nights have you fed my craving, 
a mad thing 
wild and tangled 
with tears and earth 
come crying in from the woods? 
How many years have I let you hide 
your anger and your grief inside me? 
I have learned so well how easily 
one passion is spent in another. 
And is this love 
that gorges itself, 
then slips to some cave apart 
to gnaw the bones of memory, 
till it grows lean and hungry 
once more? 

I write this under a hunter's moon, 
the years baying behind me 
like a pack of hounds.


The Soul's Active Ingredients
by Greg McNeill
About Poetry Forum

TS Eliot just paid me a visit.
He was tapping on an African drum.
He described the wasteland that he left in '65
and the wasteland in which he nows resides.

The drums, he said, contained embedded rhythms he hadn't learned 
   at Harvard
or in the litanies of London.
Rhythms that only accidentally made it into his poetry when he had 
   a vision of discontinuity.
Rhythms, he said, that would stun Rimbaud and Donne.

He's been drumming ever since he stopped breathing,
and if and when he re-incarnates
he says he'll teach the poets a thing or two about how the senses 
   interface
with the soul's active ingredients.


Remembering A City I Never Knew
by Don Schaeffer
Pen Shells

I remember the river 
lined with stone steps, 
each a tiny planet.
Neighborhoods of 
stone harbors, orange 
stone that shines in the sun. 
Hot rain and 
water everywhere poured, 
dripped, flowing. 
Life at the feet 
of great trees 
with festooned trunks, 
spiced stains and powders, 
trees are the roofs and 
air the walls. I remember 
statues of bone and ivory 
with colored parasols and 
sweet rotting smells. 
How the people rise from 
straw beds so gently smiling 
with fingers full of petals.


Corn Shy
by Kathleen Vibbert
Pen Shells

By October, crows were corn shy,
blur of sun, yellow dust at eye-level.
I walk through each row, looking for mother 
in spaces where kernels have fallen.
Days from death, she asked that fifteen 
dollars be buried with her:

I wish there were something 
to hold up to the light,
to feel the fabric of her cells,
a dollar green inside the earth,
laid out like her tongue,
silent and spent.


Love Through a Plate Glass Window
by Dave Rowley
Poets.org

I visit after closing time each night.
The dress she's wearing is faint, pink mist
draped over sculpted bones.
The fugitive turn of shoulder carves
a lucid arc towards me, awakens
the bloodline at my centre where tracks
of blue, silver, red reflected traffic
swoon and shudder through me.
Tonight the display lights hinge her lip
in a pout. Dear plaster cast
of someone long-lost and pale,
your mouth is a smudged afterthought
whispering secrets, your monologue silent
but discernable: messages slipped in coded lines
of designer clothing. Sometimes I'm there
when they undress you (I never dare to look).
The blind push and pull of my desire rubs
me wrong as crush hour crowds dissipate
leaving this thick window as our chaperone.
The wind blows cold here on the street.
Back home I fall dreamless, overcome
by grey plastered ceiling
as the grandfather clock hollows out the hallway.
Mornings find me drained, my face in the bathroom mirror
kabuki white, inching through fog. 


Bo-Peep Tunnel
by David Phillips
Criticalpoet.org

Coarse roughneck navigators built Bo-Peep 
to run the railway through to Hastings, west, 
with sculptured portals hewn from sheep-specked hills. 

Men gave their lives to progress through the chalk 
but who can trust the glistening steam-blacked bricks 
to celebrate the Irish hands who clamped 
the rails to sleepers, oil-light springing shadows 
over tunnel walls like Disney thieves? 

And who can name the pair of Wicklow men 
who bricked the tunnel wall one afternoon 
and died that evening in a pointless brawl, 
the Railway paying for their pauper graves? 

No man is marked in any book, no worker 
is remembered, but the collective noun, 
a gang of navvies, lives in common tongue-- 
and a hill in Sussex honours men 
who made a tunnel with a pretty name.


The Season of Science
by M.E. Silverman
Wild Poetry Forum

i. How to Explain What It is All About

Bees bothered by absence,
violin-hunger 
for pollen to fill their days, 
fields full of van Gogh, 
golden glows and sun fire 
of the katsura, the quick spread 
of spice over lawns, wild 
like the William Tell Overture--   
  
wait. Hear me out: this is suppose to be 
about blooms and the season of amore.  
 
  
More what? 
No, I meant-- 
here, let me try to explain.  

  
But she is dressing, 
and it is difficult to express 
postulates and proposals 
to pearls and powders, 
to a bra and blouse, to the berry pit 
of her tongue. 

  
Look: the cold of night shadows 
the countryside, bees far from the hive 
will cease their search--  

  
what? Listen. I didn't mention drones, dear. 
No, I didn't know they only had one purpose. 
I think we're getting off track here-- 
no one knows why the life expectancy of drones 
is 90 days. Oh, 
that's rhetorical.  

  
Alright, forget the fucking bees! Let me try again: 
a field with interaction has a magnetic moment-- 
that's the science of electrons. 
From a distance, an entity feels the force of another--
that's the science for particles. 
These moments do not need 
to be temporary; we can be more 
than a flyleaf on a book of nameless poems, 
more than motel meetings and phone calls 
that sound like a lute. 
Do you understand? The season of science 
is like everything that moves, 
and sooner or later, will change, 
changes, changed.
  
  
ii. Ode to Jasmine
  
The horizon's hem 
retreats, and a little light splits 
between the curtains. 
The night jasmines the room. 

  
Between the double beds, 
I left a bottle of cheap Chilean Merlot, 
thick bread sticks still in the box, cold, 
and an unopened gift in blue wrap. 

  
The radio crackles between stations, 
half-plays static and the heavy notes 
of Schubert, slow and haunting-- 
you heard it if you know such seasons. 

  
I lean in to swing shut the door and pause 
to remind me of this ode 
and the comma I changed 
to a perfect period.

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