May 2000 IBPC Winning Poetry

The Prize Winners:

1) An Imperfect Second-Hand Pantoum
by Jennifer Poteet - Writer's Block

2) Ache
by Glenn Ingersoll - Writer's Block

3) Spring Break Blues

And Honorable Mention:

Soddy
by Carol Yokum - Writer's Block

An Imperfect Second-Hand Pantoum - Jennifer Poteet - Writer's Block

On Saturdays, we pick over what's unwanted and
consider adoption.
Objects have lives and stories to tell.
I am willing to listen to the wooden jewelry box,the
Victorian doorstop.
Do things get homesick once they change hands?

We objectify our lives and tell our stories.
I've said that my rocking chair came from a
socialite's estate.
Have you ever been sick over something that has left
your hands?
There was an etching I loved of guitars that no longer
orchestrates this room.

Pewter frames were for the taking and I removed a
stranger's wedding pictures.
Objects have lives and stories to tell.
I once ruthlessly pawed through a dead woman's drawer
of gloves.
Do things get homesick once they change hands?

Ache - Glenn Ingersoll - Writer's Block

Everything's perfect. The crown of the hill, the bee
that perturbed you, the wallow the dog slumps
sideways into, daintily drinks from. I sat in
sunlight.

Now I'm sleepy.
Whatever I've eaten is sleepy
inside me. Colored lights strung like a spine.
History erected as a barrier between children,

hills, cattle. Ursa major, ursa minor. The last
streetlamp's yellow pool and the hare disappearing
then disappearing again
and again.

You don't have to be hard at work
in order to work. It is easy as pi, that numerary,
or the zero let out
of the millennium. That simple to point to

when the going gets sordid and there's a chip
putting its period in the black. You can say
to yourself, Mine. Return it to the holder cleaned

and ready for use. Work accumulates beside the kitchen
sink, the road, the streambed. Leaf and cracked antler.
It is windy, or, as he puts down the feather, winding up.

Spring Break Blues - Gary Hardaway - Gumball Poetry

Do nouns and verbs vacation? Words I thought
dependably mine are missing. Have they flown
to lie on white beaches and be lulled
asleep by jade waves and cold Coronas?

I hadn't thought they'd worked so hard for me
that sun and surf should be prescribed against
the rigorous demands of simile,
pentameter and trope. Does trochee strain

the hearts and backs of syllables? Does rhyme
inflame the glutes and abs of pronouns,
personal or im-? Is stress stanzaic, rest
caesura's antidote? Is syntax taxed

this cruel April? If you see, relaxed
among the palms and beach umbrellas, parts
of speech impersonating idle rich,
please tell them I concede: we'll try a prose

that's unassuming, workmanlike and plain
that tells a story, unambiguous
and sane, of ordinary intrigue, lust
and power. All we'll strain will be the gag

reflex of high-toned literati
and the twisted plot line's plausibility.

Honorable Mention:

Soddy - Carol Yokum - Writer's Block

Pa's breaking plow slices hard skin open.
Everyone smiles, putting large hopes in little seeds.
The sky is high and wide. Voices are lost in the
distance.
Buffalo bones and arrowheads ride the plow's wake.

We kneel in dust praying for rain while
hot winds shrivel our wheat.
Standing on the rise above the potato patch,
Pa watches the red horizon all night long.
Our soddy's another wave on a buffalo grass sea.

Angry rattlers twist away from empty feed bins.
Mice whisper endlessly of brick houses, rock candy,lace.
Pa teases Ma that corn husks are poor shoes for an
Irish mule,
but she just leans into the traces and pulls hard.
A prairie grave cradles the new baby's head.

When we rode down to town in spring,
Ma wrapped her arms around a scrawny cottonwood and
cried. Pa looked away.

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