Winner of the Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry

 Lisabeth Burton (NY) for her poem “Adolescence”

ADOLESCENCE  
 

Pull the blanket of calmed bees up to your throat.

Think about what it is you need.

In an empty room a boy clasps his hands together.

He sees the future: a small boat lodged among reeds.

Tonight a wordless want is in the air. Red hearts

grow heavy, bending branches in the grove.

A cold moon stares at itself in the river.

No meats have been cured for the inevitable winter.

A young grief spreads her wings and flies away;

you let out a small cry and prepare for the others to go.

Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry

Runner-up

 Jendi Reiter

WEDDED

Why can’t the dog and the cat get married,

the postman to the bishop, the nurse to the queen?

In the days when mud was chocolate

we could march the egg cups down the table,

humming that universal tune.

The teddy bear and the piggy bank,

the lightbulb and the tomato.

Not all of these relationships would work out,

as we knew from the sound

of cloth tearing in another room.

Still we imagined,

in those days when peppermint was money,

that a bit of lace thrown over

the cat's spitting head would make her beautiful,

and a dropcloth would stop the parrot quarreling

with his mirror mate.

We were dizzy with weddings,

even when the books fell to the floor

inky and torn, face-down like bridesmaids

with their mascara running.

Why do the things that were sold together,

the obvious salt and pepper,

rows of rolled socks like dull neighbors,

always go missing?

So we married the glove to the mitten,

in those days when morning was bedtime,

when lunch was rice flung in the street

after the tin-can fugitives,

we matched the boot to the baby's shoe

and no guests came.

Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry

Runner-up

Jeanne Wagner 

MY GRANDMOTHER’S HAIR                                       

She wore something called a rat

tucked inside her hair, a soft sausage

of mesh wound with gray strands

gleaned from her brushes and combs,

though I imagined the hair had twined itself

there on its own, the way creepers wend

through a trellis, and fine, sticky threads

ply themselves around the stifled pupa.

At night, I’d pull out the hidden loops

of her hairpins, and let down her long,

wavy hair, thin but still silky, tame

under the light strokes of my brush.

Bodies, then, were such secretive things,

surfaces to be read into, inferred:

the irregular sag of a bodice; that self-

effacing spiral of her hair; her blind

right eye, with its marbled blue iris.

The mad son. The husband I never

heard her speak of. Her drowned

brother, his woolen sweater knitted

with a special stitch, so someone would                                

know who the body belonged to,                                          

when finally the waves unfurled him,                                   

on the shore of Inishturk.

Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry

Runner-up 

                                                                
Kascha Semonovitch

PENTECOST

Speaking is like putting foreign birds

in our mouths, I say to my niece

who has made it thus far with shrieks

and gesture. We must learn language.

I take her reluctant hand. Let’s begin

with a parakeet. I manipulate her jaw

and when she opens, I put the green

opaline bird on her baby tongue.

Feathers and disaster. We re-try with

something simple: “Sparrow.” Grey

and brown and eventually more familiar.

But no sound.

We go for a walk days later. Heron! She retreats

and raises an arm in awe. But the bird is too big

for words. We go farther and then return

to watch the ones at the feeder: cardinal,

wren, cruel crow, crazy pigeon, interrupting squirrel,

lazy dove. Some words fit like pelicans, I explain:

not at all. Some are as elegant on the page as flamingoes

in flight, and silly when they walk alone. Others

are defunct penguins. I try to draw the shapes, the black

field-guide profiles we identify them with. But

it was the Indigo Bunting —

                                                All at once in an unnamed park,

with a loose fit field with just enough even, dry grass,

the Indigo Bunting!

and the need to identify

what she has seen, burst out with the pressure of wings

Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry

Runner-up

   Katharyn Howd Machan

IN OUR DARKNESS STRUNG WITH STARS

       1.

I went to see Laurie Anderson.

She told us about the end of the moon.

      2.

When my brother (who touched me

wrong when I was a little girl)

died (suicide)

I reached out with my hand

and put my palm on his forehead

and held it there

past infinity’s time

until I was so cold, too,

I couldn’t imagine a fire

strong enough to release us

both into the stars.

      3.

She wore the blackest outfit,

black with shiny pulses

of small paillettes and tiny beads,

jet stitched into clinging cloth

so she could move, so she could play

her wired violin. Black

against a stage draped black,

and the lights, those dangerous

candles.

      4.

He was the one who got me

reading science fiction, writing

poems of stellar speculation

— he wasn’t stupid, dim, or dull —

but then his body, laid on a cart,

crumpled, collapsed. Crooked mouth                 

slacked open, like a possum,

like a mole gone up to the skies

and back, five hard points

for the sun’s own roots,

Condylura cristata,

burrowing, snuffling through dark.

      5.

We became small, watching.

Closely, exactly, she gave us her voice,

words a tesseract, reaching.

Dream-story story-dream and her

sad long smile a ladder.

In the ceiling of the theater

constellations gleamed and dimmed.

My brother killed himself at night

five months after the towers crashed.

Music has stopped for me, he wrote.

The spheres turned silent, falling.

      6.

Imagine a strategic installation

240,000 miles away,

the air too tight and still for music,

like a locked car, like

Death poised at the window

you gaze out from, up,

silver light some winter nights,

gold

for September’s harvest.

Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry

Runner-up

  Cornelia Hoogland

LAST PASS AT HAPPINESS BUT MISSES HER FLIGHT, LOSES HER LUGGAGE

One hopes there’s a window—something of a view—in the room in the probably hot, distant country in which the airline employees work the phones in the Baggage Claims department. It’s got to be a crummy job but they get to ask swell questions

like identify one unique item in your suitcase.

One unique item. What to choose

from among toothbrush and jeans

you took on that crazy trip you were calling your best chance:

also feather collar, roots and leaves, leather belt

with loops

for knives. You can almost feel

the employee’s rummaging hand

clasp that frilly pink heart of yours—it’s embarrassing.

But it’s more than that. You’re being made

to look backward, to recognize

the telling detail

like the novelist who knows what her character keeps in his socks drawer. What’s inside

that second piece of luggage the attendant’s asking. Can you describe—this box?

Cardboard you tell her. A Tim T-i-m Hortons box. Yellow rope round its middle.

FRAGILE stamped in red. And inside?

Very fragile, your life

when pieces are pried from the narrative, hope laid bare.

Verbs wrenched from people-movers in the airport, marched back to the check-in counter.

Everything’s different now—

that story’s left without you. So stop

whining and claim your bag: those pretty, hurtful shoes,

mangled tape, Crazy Glue, etc. Stick with

who you are. Were.