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Winter/Spring 2009


Winner of the Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry

 Lisabeth Burton (NY) for her poem “Adolescence”

 

  Judge’s Comments: 

I like how this poem feels both perfectly controlled and perfectly strange.  Its subtle, yet insistent, repetition of vowels (bees/need/sees/reeds) and consonants (together/future/air/stares/river) suggests a single mind’s thoughts unspooling.  Yet the continual shifts and surprises—the refusal to force connections, the reliance on inventive, deft metaphors—hints at something unsettled or menacing just out of sight, just out of earshot.

                                                                                                               - Chris Forhan

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 







Spring 2008


(get your copy on our SUPPORT US page)


Stephen Dunn

 THE GASOLINE SPORTCOAT

                  Slow? He so fast he run through

                  hell in a gasoline sportcoat, and

                  live to tell about it.

                                          - Cassius Clay on Sonny Liston

 

At parties, women with skirts

     slit up to their thighs

have been known to touch it,

 

and men of all kinds turn suddenly alert

     in its presence,

seemingly envious or wary.

 

I call it my gasoline sportcoat,

     my live-to-tell-about-it

antidote to what’s shy in me.

 

With it on, I’m able to challenge

     those who Jesus us

beyond all sympathy, laugh at others

 

who, in the glare of daily atrocities,

     say it’s hell

having this ache, this head cold.

 

Without it, when I walk into a room

     it’s as if Anonymous

has preceded me and stolen the spotlight,

 

his amazing fame on everyone’s mind.

      A man like me needs help

to get through a day and the long slide

 

into evening. Which is why at home

     I push its hanger

deep into the closet as if it might gather

 

strength there, in darkness, be ready

     for a next time.

It’s mingling now with my ties and shirts,

 

it’s influencing the sweaters on the topmost

     shelf, it’s becoming

its story, the story I’m now telling.




Timothy Liu

 PRINTED ON ARCHIVAL QUALITY PAPER


 Our century’s spiritual epic written in a hand

we cannot read. Impossible

                                              to counterpoint

the apolitical dream reduced to an apple

without design

 while icy cosmic chatterings

orbit the earth, filtered through the radio’s

intermittent fuzz —

        history taking on shape —

a diary scrawled into by a child’s hand. Few

are given a shiny penny

                                       let alone carte blanche

to do as they please — this isn’t a primetime

pilot freed from costs —

    one can’t just watch

ratings plummet. Welcome then to the new

upheaval ushering in a day

        so dishwater dull

one can’t help acknowledge some grand design

buried in the backyard dirt

                                            as the landscape

slides on its native blood like messages left

unopened

      suddenly retrieved from the trash-





Katharyn Howd Machan

THE WOMAN WHO WON’T DANCE WITH GOD

says No thanks, my card’s full.
She slips out of her crystal slippers
and sets them on a window sill
next to a glass of flat champagne,
a strawberry someone tasted, spat.
Barefoot now she crosses bright tiles
of a balcony facing the sea. Her dress
is red, the simplest crimson. Alone
where night birds sing names and poems
she moves this way, she moves that,
her arms above her naked head
finding music in her own breath.



Carmen Firan

delirium

I woke up with a dry mouth
in my dream I’d told you everything that could be said

rain kept falling upward and the water dissolved
my enemies’ names with shoe polish labels
all were floating, sodden and swollen, on a street where I once strolled
for the sole pleasure of the conspirators of dream
with such loneliness my men stretched out their necks
and flew in fluttering capes
like bats scattered over the city

I was the only inhabitant
of a blue cup
terribly thirsty


    (Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Firan)






Katherine Lien Chariott

 FOREIGN QUARTER (TAIPEI, 1968)

This place is not home. Here people sleep through the day, and wake with the night, as if they were ghosts, all out of this world, and all waiting. Here, the moon shines in small slivers; it tells shadows to slide from their rooms, and then slide out the door. I watch as they go, and after they have gone. I can see across this city: places I have been to, places I will be again. There are red lights in the dark, pants thrown across chairs, and room after room after room, all waiting.

Eyes closed, I still see: watch ghost-girls go out. They leave this place that’s not home, to duck into darkness. They float to the foreign quarter, turn red with the lights, let white hands guide them down dangerous paths. Green uniforms and green dollars lead the way. They find the thin-walled buildings; they open the doors that never quite close. They bring the ghost-girls inside, where they land on their feet, but just barely. High heels tap unsteady rhythms down empty hallways, and up dimly lit stairs. I can hear their echo, even now. It is the music of my own feet, from those nights that have passed, when I followed the moon. From the nights that will come, when I will float to the foreign quarter, a ghost-girl again, in search of green men and green money.

It is only tonight I am human. Only tonight I will stay where I am. Sit with the cold, and think about ghosts. Stare at the floor, and let it reflect me in fragments, faceless and strange. I am waiting for the screams that come from the street. It is only the cats, scratching across roofs, but the sound is like the baby that should have been mine, calling me to another world. I go there to meet her, in that place without ghosts. I go there to join her, in that place that reminds me of home. Together, we play in rice paddies, steady on bare feet, and safe where the men in green can’t find us.