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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