A Psalm to Touch - Judy Lewis - Café Utne
Instructive hand, gently write, tenderly erase.
With chalk's soft powder trace my outline in the dark.
Voiceless mouth, speak unworded language to my ear.
Scent my hair with sensate breath like healing herbs.
Passionate belief, make worshipful my freefall will.
Guide my hands' abrasive heresies to prayer.
Favored fruit, ripen slowly in my palm.
Reduce the world to this: peach around a stone.
Merciful music, draw out my frantic chords.
Then sooth my ragged melody into silence.
(Judges comment:
A masterful kinaesthesia traces all the senses to their root in the silence
of touch. Calm music of a six-stress alexandrine line, unhurried, timeless,
vast. Attains a spiritual dimension from within the details.)
Six Doors Down - Joy Yourcenar - MindFire
We start our day with buttered toast and jam,
brush our teeth three minutes, up and down,
pack a snack and walk to school, hand in hand.
Six doors down, the yellow police line trembles;
we step across the crackled track of blood and glass,
choke on the descending creosote, haze and ash,
offer up guilty prayers for the untested grace
the smoke detected deliverance.
Lisa McNeil, lacking miracles, dies before the fire,
her court order no protection
against his kerosene soaked rage.
Melted paint coagulates; flames rumor
through the row-house intimacy,
an obscenity of white molded lawn chair legs
violates the top story window space.
On the corner of Creighton and Gerrish,
the sidewalks strewn with tv sets
flung from upstairs windows,
piles of boxes, kitchen chairs,
the bric-a-brac debris surviving tenants saved.
Police and paramedics wait while
firemen orchestrate their hydrant hose choreography,
push out cracked panes with plastic pails,
sit on the sidewalk sucking oxygen,
return to float through billows
of roof obscuring fog and smoke,
ministering angels passing over,
marking doors and splintering lintels.
(Judges comment:
Clarity made more terrible by the schoolchild opening. Intimately observed
rage and terror. The final image of the Passover is entirely earned.)
Saga Love - Bee Rawlinson - Callahan's Saloon
Love me when I'm old and shocking
Peel off my elastic stockings
Swing me from the chandeliers
Let's be randy bad old dears
Push around my chromed Bath Chair
Let me tease your white chest hair
Scaring children, swapping dentures
Let us have some great adventures
Take me to the Dogs and Bingo
Teach me how to speak the lingo
Bone my eels and bring me tea
Show me how it's meant to be
Take me to your special places
Watching all the puzzled faces
You in shorts and socks and sandals
Me with warts and huge love-handles
As the need for love enthrals
Wrestle with my dampproof smalls
Make me laugh without constraint
Buy me chocolate body paint
Hold me safe throughout the night
When my hair has turned to white
Believe me when I say it's true
I've waited all my lives for you
(Judge's comment: A joyous light-hearted romp, a paean to sexy old age.)
Honorable Mentions:
Melange Guapo - Gary Keenan - WDS Writers Block
For Joan Houlihan
If the beginning comes first, interrupt
The jelly with another form of contraception
So the panjandrum might be enthroned
In theory but imprisoned by practicalities-
The jump-rope knotted in a noose, the tantrum
On the Isle of Langerhans, a split Chevrolet:
Merely foaming sodas of nuance, impertinent
Bubbles in the nostrum; but where is my mackinaw?
Please, I'm at loose and raving marshmallow.
Go figure, no one will notice, the spleen
Of even seven heavenly assassins no more
Irrigates the tendrils of my tongue
Than do the carparks of Westphalia, ham and all.
Sadly, not too many grains are left to share,
And you look like my granny did the month after she died.
At least the napkin lies. I'm elsewhere.
Rule of the Plowman - H.G. Brown -About.com
In a place where nothing was permitted,
Everything mattered.
A sudden quarter note on the E-flat clarinet
Could grate upon ungrateful ears.
The Plowman
Might decide to publish his displeasure.
Then a man would disappear;
His compositions,
Reference to his life and work,
His name
And all that was of him would vanish.
His wife,
Removed to Khabarovsk, in time remarried;
His children forgot his face.
After twenty years the man returned,
But not to Moscow.
Internal exile dumped him in a village
Between the Volga and the Don, and there
A position would be found
As band director.
Of course, everyone understood
He knew a lot about the E-flat clarinet.
I am not surprised to learn that,
During the rehearsal
Of his father's Eleventh Symphony,
Maxim Shostakovich whispered,
"Papa, what if they hang you for this?"
Jukebox - Sharron Egan Belson - Rabbit Hole
Come into the center of me
with that voice of pure molten male
oh, Frankie...long gone
such as you are
I listen to you here
in this small space and my heart
blooms like a heated rose
in paradise
Red Shoes - Phil Stinson - Rabbit Hole
What do piano players do?
We leave trails of barrooms
empty glasses, full ashtrays,
sweaty clothes, spent energy, scattered ex-wives,
fistfights, hard blues, latent violence,
drugs, glassy stares of hookers,
small paydays, late-night television, bad motels,
trinkets from famous gigs, worn suitcases,
become strangers to morning,
field requests with expressionless eyes,
slip good songs between commercial tripe,
examine new gray hair in distorted backstage mirrors,
confide in no one, change clothes,
and pour powder into red pimp shoes.
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