Enlightenment - Marilyn Injeyan - MindFire
When her mother throws
a metal sugar jar at her dad,
leaving a dent in the wall,
the child appears calm.
She has studied Buddha,
has chosen to follow his path
accepts the dharma, his teachings
of peace and moderation.
Wearing a yellow robe,
she sits in the shade
of a fig tree and vows
to remain till answers come.
Her hair swept up
in a wisdom bump. Curls
combed to the right.
She's drawn a mark between
her brows, wheels on her small
palms and the soles of her feet.
She's in the lotus position.
No one in the house
notices her absence.
A hand fills her rice bowl.
She gathers filtered light
to bathe her mind, to drown
the screams and silences
and sweep away spilled sugar.
(Judge's comment: The clarity of these images, filtered through the controlled
movement of the stanzas, reflects the meditative calm of the protagonist,
framed by screaming. )
A Letter From Your Sisters - JP Reese - Writer's Block
Dear Sylvia and Anne,
We are stuck in your confessional.
We can't get out. The marriage
of outhouse noise with barnyard
pig-grunts stuffs our ears with ugliness.
You sculpted your pain onto each page,
gaining speed and direction
like the terminal thrusts of a rejected lover.
You sensed time was short, the long night
creeping inside your heads. Yet you sought
no creaking door, no key, no light
to seep through cracks and direct your retreat
from the edge. The air crackles,
alive with electroshock. We turn
and we turn our feet, retrace each step
believed to have led us here
but everything known vanishes.
We smell carbon monoxide and cooking gas.
Somewhere, a bloody sun slips slowly
into a mulberry sea.
(Judge's comment: The poet engages with the suicides Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton, taking on the ugliness of their despair with unsparing
sensual appetite.)
Remnants - Tara A. Elliott - Callahan's Saloon
For Sara Bisel - the Bone Lady
You hold the past in wizened fingers,
repair crushed fragments with ardent glue,
fill in interruptions with dedicated wire,
chronicle lives with compassionate centimeters, and
uncover stories with sympathetic measured inches.
The roughness, bumps, and indentations speak to you,
not with words, or flesh, or the language of eyes,
but with bone;
the core of chalk calling out to be heard.
As this woman-girl child keens
from her wooden shelf, label bearing a number--
another yellow-plastic sarcophagus thick with the dust of the put-away.
You slowly uncase her like a disintegrating cork
from an aged port bottle, pieces spilling upon your table.
You pause,
your ritual of letting bones breathe themselves into life.
She lies on the table in a jumble,
a heap of complications for you to divulge.
You pick up each piece,
bathe it carefully in acrylic solution, and replace it.
One hundred thousand times you have done this.
You revere the repetition of the process.
There is method to this,
the picking up, the dipping, the drying --
the laying out of bone on bone.
Just as there was method to this woman,
her hands pressed against the dent of abdomen,
to protect the growth within.
Like this woman,
you know what it is to carry hope inside,
like an unborn eggshell child.
As you unfold her ancient fingers slowly, gently,
she comes alive.
It is your passion, this history of bone,
this brittle whiteness, the delicate lives...
and you,
the translator of death.
(Judge's comment: A portrait pieced together with the same care with
which the forensic anthropologist reconstructs the life of the girl-child
from some vanished time.)
Honorable Mentions:
Compost Heap - Phil Stinson - Rabbit Hole
Throw on alcoholic fathers, grandfathers,
lesbian ex-wives,
battles with Crown Royal,
shaky morning coffee cups,
hard blues sweating on the keys,
the hooker's unbuttoned blouse,
sidewalk nights howling in the rain.
I'll learn Scarlatti on the violin,
become pure
study meditation
change the cast of eye
till these self-destructive impulses under
use this garbage to grow.
Words to Say - D.G. Anthony - CriticalPoet
The priest knew all the proper words to say.
He'd never met her, but he had a note
and mentioned everything my uncle wrote.
He said she'd had a good life anyway.
The old piano that she used to play
still holds remembered cadences of those
Welsh melodies she loved; but I suppose
we'll sell it now that Betty's passed away.
I saw her schedules written on a chart
pinned to the study wall: she'd meant to speak
to Mum, and booked the dentist for next week.
It's strange, the little things that break your heart.
I'd watched her growing weaker day by day,
but never found the proper words to say.
The County Coroner
- Teri Browning - CriticalPoet
coaches little league,
has five kids of his own
with hyphenated names, still-
I want him.
No matter the memories
he'd bring to my flesh:
tiny hands, or death,
slick-flat on a cold slab or
rough and tumble in green grass,
dark-suited solemn sex or
abandoned, sweaty sin-
I want him.
He zipped my mother up
with gentle hands,
smoothed back a stray hair-
I want her.
I want him.
5:51 AM
- H. Novack - About.Com
Houses huddling close out of the wind
Worn sidewalks
Like a Dorchester spared the Exterminating Angels
Wheeze of bus brakes like a last deflation of dreams
The funny feeling the Vietnamese store signs are laughing at me
Open the paper sick with dread
Scuse mutters the elephant on my foot
To Grow Fur - Jael Williams - Café Utne
With
shrill music,
a blue jay calls;
echoing the remembered
keening of orcas
under water.
I long for hairy limbs.
Want to grow fur all over
to warm myself, try to
stay whole
in the painful memory
of rabbit stew
eaten down at the beach
beside a little fire,
with you.
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