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Winning Poems for August 2008
Judge Tony Barnestone



Tsunami Prelude
by Brenda Levy Tate Pen Shells Salt water curls back - tongue against sky roof. Mud sucks and hisses, salivary, raw red gleaming to horizon like a muscle sheath. It is miraculous, this wrenched ocean, sudden absence of tide. Even gulls are astonished. Thin cloud scallops edge emptiness. Blind bivalves sputter and spout as I cross their wet bed. Caught among flotsam, barnacled pine-limbs point fingerbones. Impaled, a child's photo grins grey, wavers. My own eyes (little changed), bedraggled hair-bow, missing tooth. No acne yet. I refuse to save myself. Beside a tampon case, my jewel-box gapes, pink and broken. It may have just given birth to something unnameable. Storm petrels knife into the wind. To my left, an old man bends toward a stained helmet; three women on my right drape prom dresses over their arms - lace bodices, tulle skirts. Half-buried in silt, an Evening in Paris bottle reminds me I'm allergic. But today's scents are kelp, rust, blended fresh remains. This is too large a harvest for one season. Diaries with vinyl covers; teen dolls holding tiny 45s. Worn saddle shoes (brown trim, not the black I wanted). Oak cane - I know it from my closet debris. Scattered costume beads, brooches, safety pins, cracked glass goblets. Decanter I once gave my dad for his birthday. I stamp on a wedding ring with cheap diamond chips. Circular imprint: perfect fake clamhole. Dried-rose-petal dervishes blow across cumuli. Ululations (ecstasy? anguish?) roil heat haze. On the beach, girls' cries disturb this universe. Freight-train-thundershake. Tourists yell run in their language. Not mine. Along a naked seafloor, silver leaps joyous and unintelligent. When the rro-ooo-ll is called up yo-o-onder. I'm not sure where I'll be, except not there. The promdress ladies are gone, nothing left but a mohair stole. I wrap myself in woolscratch, recall Nana knitting its duplicate. Senior year. It scrapes at my skin like an oyster knife. I lie down, open myself. We'll drown, the old man reassures me. Foam gargles toward us. That's the point. Living in the Body of a Firefly by Laurie Byro Desert Moon Review Cotton mouthed, hung over, I wake up in my sooty dress somehow ashamed to be seen in the utter waste of daylight. The barbecue with all those mint juleps on the verandah was intense but I strayed too long on the edge of a glass. I long for a quiet train trestle, wood and paint chipping off, not those city lights where I am one of millions. I'm not fooled by the low murmurings of the river, cattails to luxuriate in, but danger in the deep-throated baritone of frogs. Damselflies are entirely self-involved and bossy, known to eat out of their own behinds. Never mind, there's safety in numbers. A neighbor has an easy split in a porch screen and as I'm on a tear of wild nights before I die, I've set my sights on their cathedral ceiling. In the sway of tall grasses his youngest cups her hands around me to pray. I am coveted in the moist chapel of fingers. Tonight, I'll hang around until they are all half lidded-drowsy. I'll skitter down to her favorite blanket where she'll wish upon me like I am the last star falling, the last creature on earth. Surviving the Ugly by Sandy Benitez SplashHall On a dusty dirt road squats a rundown mosque. Rumors point to a new recreation center for soldiers. I, an "infidel" disagree. Blasphemy! To put American spit-shine on its dingy blue tiles. Escort duty--hours of sitting, walking in circles without a straight jacket. The sun above Baghdad angrier here than back home. Dropping heat bombs, exploding on armpits and breasts. Five days of wearing the same sweat-stained bra. Baby powder works wonders. A soldier swears by Febreze; his trousers going on a record eight days. In the hooch, I thank God for air conditioning. Say hello to Mother Mary watching me quietly from the blanket. She doesn't belong here, in this unfamiliar place. Still, she's an acceptable battle buddy; comforting me when nightmares creep into my skull, ricocheting horrors of war like sporadic bullets fired in the air. Suddenly, sirens scream, "Duck & Cover! Duck & Cover!" Channel 16 on the radio shreaks static, "Help me!" I can't understand a word. Thunderous seconds knock me down. A flip flop lands across the room! Tasting hair and lint. Boom! Wait for it... Boom! Is there enough life insurance? Boom! Will my children remember me? Silence. Except for my pounding heart. A quick "Amen." The siren returns, chanting "all clear! all clear!" Helicopter blades loudly buzz, giant dragonflies gone berserk. Always in pairs, off to find bad boys who played with daddy's rockets when mommy wasn't looking. Mother Mary calls to me. "Sit down and breathe." Offers me water; I sip, shake my fears. We resume the evening watching tv. Game shows; she beats me at Jeopardy every time. Relax. Stretch legs, eyelids lower. My toenails are horrible; they need clipping. How Soft is the Blackness that Cannot Bring Me Joy by Ellen Kombiyil Blueline Day dawns, bright as chrysanthemums. I am balanced on the brink of the earth. Somewhere else, light fades on the edge of chalk-white cliffs. I can taste them, dry as death. Nightingales sing the last song of night. If only I could graze your arm, your imagined scent still clinging to the pillow. I try to remember but not to think, that's what Jesse Jackson says when he remembers Memphis. I'd like to adopt a philosophy like that. Philosophy is meaningless when sun hits the empty pillow. I was young when I met you bling-blinging at the party to the sounds of revamped disco. Night tasted of sweat and you'd forgotten my name because I wore my best dress. How soft is the blackness that cannot bring me joy you said, or something like that. The elusive smoke of giddiness crept into our heads and love was like a funeral. We fell through earth and swam out upside down the other side. Little Boo spelunked the forests, convinced I was vanished. I hadn't said au revoir or sounded a warning note. Years from now I will write a song and you will not hear it shaking the forsythia, their drab bells having forgotten your name. Your name means 'ocean' or 'lake,' or 'teeming with life', or 'vessel,' and I remember what water sounds like only when it rains: the river widens its mouth; the forsythia sings hallelujah. Ca ne fait rien, it was so long ago and morning empties through porch windows to echo in the parlor. If Men Wore Lip Paint by Bernard Henrie The Writer's Block I am an amateur of love, but I will write a love poem. I will say: the moon is yellow as a goldfish and big as the breast of an opera singer. No. I would write about the rich thighs of widows, or an older woman burnished by the meticulous night and speaking Spanish in loving tongue to a younger man. I will write for a heavy woman sitting in an airport terminal, called from a pasha couch in a garden, a cumquat delicately placed under her clothes. Young women in summer dresses half-hidden by a curved boat hull, shirt fronts buttoned by men who gaze as though saying rosary. Rain passes into the night, love grows old, poems fall asleep in a chair. Let me start again: if men wore lip paint, breasts and hips of women would stain red. Seiren Song by Steve Parker criticalpoet.org that made him yearn not for women not water's shades some same cool and riversides and rat-shatters and ice and low bursts and green fingers stretching for his only to drug as from strings words out of him but to a night-sky whirled in lofts within reach of that fishman which spun from salt jism ancestors the while alert to tugs the binary [fire] engine-putting (slow as yawls) (moans of location) (mist) over years over humming shadow machinery limbic waves of song take me up he crieth take in the Fall flowered as arrayed death dynamited grey-flopping up murk-bearing O grim-aspected fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen casting of sparks, bearing of eggs, spuming of milt some psentage've what hear've in dead channels outflow've of a litl bang your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting but this, this (O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia thy mermids ist none so faire— what outspankered prismes, what neutic flutic combes soonest they bare)

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