IBPC Winning Poems for April & May 2012

Our discussion forum for topics related to writer's block, poetry, the literary arts in general, and anything else of cosmic import.
Post Reply
Message
Author
Michael (MV)
Posts: 2154
Joined: 18 Apr 2005, 04:57

IBPC Winning Poems for April & May 2012

#1 Post by Michael (MV) » 14 Jul 2012, 05:04

April Judged by Shara McCallum


First Place
Drought
by Sue Kay
Pen Shells

Drought raises its head, trumpets another amber sunrise, tusks
the earth, charges the faded foliage, tramples, tosses it aside.
Storm-less days wrinkle and die. Dust on sun-cracked skin, dust
in the eyes . On the horizon, dust lightning sparks from clouds
that have rubbed themselves dry. Heat like a prayer for rain lights
the night with a fire line. Drought like darkness grows a shape

shakes itself free of restraints, parches, attacks and backs
its quarry into another hot day. Heat, like the aim of the hunter,
sights the prey, brings it down beneath an ivory sky. Drought pales
everything in its gaze, shimmers the promise of a lake lapping
dry waves. The deep aquifers bleed out pumping into wells
that fail to stanch the earth’s thirst. Heat blows its dry breath

into the land’s panicked mouth, pants a warning ahead of drought’s
heavy foot that stamps, bellows its coming. Heat enters into
every corner, every refuge, wearies of its charge, worries dead
brush and picked bones. Bored with the kill, drought turns once
to see ash and smoke sift over ruined leaves into dry streams,
drift and smother, like doubt, like memory.


Judge's Comments:
From my first read, I was caught up in this poem and on many re-readings that feeling of being swept up in language never abated. The poem is a tour-de-force of image and sound, showing off poetry’s ability to resonate in the mind and ear. This poem also captivated me because the ending culminates in a statement. In that last line, the poet moves away from relying on image alone, saying something about what “drought” means—this is a risky move that pays off, as what is said feels both surprising and, yet, exactly right. --Shara McCallum


Second Place (Tie)
The Roofer Stays Up
by Jim Zola
The Waters

I sit atop this roof after the last
shingler has tossed his last wisecrack
to no one. Across the street, a couple
hesitate in the doorway between
the hushed dark of the house, a brush
of streetlight. I suppose they are lovers
because I am alone. I suppose
that when they spill into the furnishings
of their lives, they’ll touch at the wrist.
Just as I suppose this night will stay
like lovers who stifle their cries
with silk scarves because walls are thin,
windows left open. By morning,
when others arrive, I’ll say
I came in early to avoid the heat.


Judge's Comments:
The subtlety of this poem is what drew me in. The voice is unassuming and its honesty accretes power, as in the lines, “I suppose/that when they spill into the furnishings/of their lives, they’ll touch at the wrist.” The speaker’s observation, here (steeped in metaphor) and elsewhere, brims with insight without being showy or heavy-handed. The diction of the poem is also simple, the lines spare and restrained, all of which makes the existential condition of the speaker (“I am alone”) all the more moving. --Shara McCallum


Second Place (Tie)
Yard Work
by Dale McLain
Wild Poetry Forum

The shed is orderly, all muted shades,
and there within I am a glimmer.
The air smells of cedar and rust.
I find shears in a coffee can,
wrapped in flannel, blades ready
still to whisper in polished sighs.
In this beautiful solitude, I cut the sapphire

threads stitched on me, cipher
of disregard, a pilfered incantation.
The pure laziness of affection
staggers me, as if it were a bundle
of broken branches thrust at me.
Now I hope for a late frost to dull the glass,
clouds to tether the sky, a night cold

enough to sleep a silvery sleep.
But the year has lost its keen edge
and by mid-day it is too warm
to weave into this poem. I am hungry
for some faith, a curtain of radiant light
to shield me, but there are flowers
instead. A confection of blushing buds

trembles against the cloudbank.
Listen, I exaggerate. The days are sweet,
laden with splendid little sufferings.
I feel like a saint until nightfall when sin
nips my heels. I hate this weather though,
the frail cusp of spring, all tender and bright.
It reminds me of everything that ever died.


Judge's Comments:
I love this poem because it constantly surprised me: with its diction and phrasing, as well as its imaginative reach. The physical and emotional world the poet attends is meticulously rendered and is also often being undercut, lest it become sentimental. Even the poet’s own stance is self-consciously tempered as in the sentence, “listen, I exaggerate.” And the last line of the poem offers the biggest and most satisfying turn of all: that beauty ‘reminds us of everything that ever died.’ --Shara McCallum


Third Place
How is Florida treating you? Best, Jim
by Susan Katz
conjunction

Tampa is fine.

Florida treats me well,
though the move from New York
leaves me homesick.

The weather’s on track, sky all blue,
different bugs for different seasons,
if you can call hot, ter, test seasons.

Business is sluggish, I have arthritis,
am neurotic, skidding downhill after 60,
my daughter still doesn’t speak to me—

I wish I would die already, get life
over and done with, out-of-the-way,
Fini.

What could be bad?


Judge's Comments:
The persona of this poem grabs my attention and doesn’t let go. I love the phrasing throughout this poem (“sky all blue” and “I wish I would die already” as two examples), which turns the voice on the page into a fully-dimensional character. This poem provides us with a hard-edged, humorous, unsparing, and unflinching look at one’s own aging and death—what else could you ask for? --Shara McCallum


Honorable Mention
First Kiss at Fifty
by John Wilks
The Write Idea

She had grown to look exactly like
herself, while I had just grown older.
Within the first five minutes, we spoke
more to each other than we had in
five years of school. She had photographs

of the class, but I could not find my
face in the black and white uniformed
ranks. She remembered me more fondly
than I deserved, though I had become
all the things I once despised. I was

Mister Suit’n’Tie, Mister Safe Pair
of Hands, Mister Never Takes a Risk,
Mister Home, Hearth and Family. She
kissed me thirty years too late, when it
could no longer make a difference.

I took a train home when she caught a
plane back to Australia. As she
drove her motorcycle across the
outback, I walked from room to room and
sometimes out into the back garden.


Judge's Comments:
I admire this poem’s ability to take a situation that could easily become a cliché and rescue it from that predicament. The poem especially soars for me in the last two stanzas, in which the speaker’s regret for a life unlived is handled with grace and power. The “sometimes” in the last line of the poem is heartbreaking. --Shara McCallum



May Judged by Shara McCallum


First Place
Dry season
by Judy Kaber
The Waters


After the spring thaw when what snow there was melted, left
Braille trickles in the dirt, the time came for me to move,
carry the last load of hay to the barn, scratch the goat, feel her
dry bag sag down low. Time came for me to let the dog free,
ease her collar over her scrawny neck, give her room
finally to drink her fill from that dented aluminum bowl. Time to
gather my clothes together in the burlap sack. Take my spoon,
half a jug of whiskey, the fancy linen table cloth, white faded to
ivory with only a few moth holes. Turn the latch, greet the
jittering morning, birds like torn leaves, kick song in the bushes.
Kind of like this day’s a bad draft of all the others. Too many
loose vowels and crossed off lines. Too many bitter
moments like off-kilter rhymes. I step in the dust-mottled yard,
notice the black sprawl, piles of wood ashes. Makes me think
of the days when I had a little smoke house out front,
plenty of ham, bacon, tied with twine, and me always with
quick thrusts of green apple boughs to keep the burn going.
Right now don’t mean much. Right now I think I should have
sold it all in one fell punch. Not that anyone would come looking.
Too far out. Roads like black pus. No electricity. No water
unless you use the pump. Too far gone now. Never had many
visitors, except maybe when I had those chickens. Don’t know
why now I sold them. Bright little bunch. Claws that made little
x’s in the ground, hunting bugs. That was their life, laying
you eggs, spending the rest of their time searching for insects,
zig-zagging some crazy path. No sense to it. None.


Judge's Comments:
The voice that comes through in this dramatic monologue is Faulknerian, replete with the drama of loss yet completely understated and matter-of-fact about this aspect of life. The speaker/persona of this poem observes the world so meticulously and unselfconsciously that everything radiates a greater meaning (the chickens, for example, are never just chickens). The diction of this poem is constantly inventive (“Braille trickles,” “jittering morning,” “dust-mottled yard,” etc.)—yet never loses the sense of the colloquial speech that makes the character of the speaker so believable and engaging. Finally, the form of this poem (an abecedarian) is used in the best manner—seamlessly, unobtrusively—and is inseparable from content. On many levels, this is a masterful poem. --Shara McCallum


Second Place
Front Range
by Steve Meador
FreeWrights Peer Review


The Front Range is arid, a place where leather simmers, takes ages to rot. Iron refuses to rust. It is a place of smoke and dust and sun lust. It is swept with tidal waves of wind that peel the moisture from your lips, gulp water from your body and shoot it up the slopes of the Rockies, or shove it down the throat of the plains. It is a region dry as mummy tongue and wrapped in a bland of multiple tans. There, you find yourself with flat lungs and legs of lead but, like the morning cool, those will escape to higher blue. You can walk where there are no sounds except gurgling nerves and a morning sun crushing its way along the next ridge. It is a place of catkins and cactus, meadowlarks and magpies, waterfalls and star-fired nights, cottonwood and columbine. It is rugged, littered with knee-deep creeks and weather-worn boulders. It is a massive and open land, lifting into the sky, like Icarus, and built on the back of smallness. That is something we all forget, that everything is built on and from and of smallness.


Judge's Comments:
This prose poem’s description of place and use of anaphora are what initially drew me to it—there is much to appreciate here on the level of image and sound. In multiple readings, those remained constants. Added to that, I also became increasingly impressed and moved by the poets’ ability to lead us, through the accumulation of stark and desolate images of the Front Range, to the poem’s dramatic conclusion about the nature of life: “everything is built on and from and of smallness.” --Shara McCallum


Third Place (Tie)
Perfect
by Hugh Anderson
Desert Moon Review


Easy to take an orange, cup it in one hand,
dig the thumb of the other through the first sharp,
citrus, tang, or maybe use four fingers, gathering
zest under nails, then savour sweetness with an acid

edge. Simple enough to plot 207 bones
on a strand of DNA to shape the miracle who
grasps her mother’s little finger. Machinery
of wonder, bones, tendons, muscles, neurons
pulsing: open, close, grasp, loosen. And yet,

the microscopic god whose voice commands
cells to multiply and form forgot the words,
for one brief moment could not conceive the shape
of arms, forgot two bones. Not then
the wonder of creation nor even evolution’s

complexity, rather the perfection of being.
This perfect baby knows how her hands work, not
that they are different, knows how to pick
the smallest crumb between two fingers, knows
that I smile when she strokes my calloused palm.


Judge's Comments:
This lyric-narrative poem is beautifully crafted, the poet’s control of diction and tone nearly flawless. Like the act of peeling an orange—the image that opens the poem—the poem itself is multi-layered and ‘unpeels’ as it unfolds to reveal the intersection of the personal and philosophical. For me, the poem is at its most “perfect” in the lines: “Not then/the wonder creation nor even evolution’s/complexity, rather the perfection of being.” Within this statement reside the poem’s central and lasting questions: What is “perfection”? What is the nature of “being”? --Shara McCallum


Third Place (Tie)
Stormland
by Fred Longworth
PenShells


Through my window, asphalt shimmers
as if the pixelation of the world were losing its grip.
In the gutter, clumps of leaves begin a ceremony
of decay. Umbrellas trudge along the sidewalk
shading blurred, generic eyes.
Cars blunder down the street, while collisions wait
in ambush. The rain comes down so heavy,
it’s hard to tell where the cars end,
and the space around them begins.
Even words surrender to the storm.

Eyes closed, I picture an enormous book,
broad as a mountain, open to the drenching sky.
What humanity has discovered in the odyssey
of a thousand generations is scribed within this tome.
The rain beats down. It strikes and slaps.
It wants to make the paper soft,
and turn the wisest ink to smears of mayhem.
There are no shrouds or jackets broad enough
to spare the fragile pages. All that stands
against this riot is memory.


Judge's Comments:
This poem found its way inside me because of its images and the particularity of phrasing the poet uses to render those. “In the gutter, clumps of leaves begin a ceremony/ of decay,” is one example and a stand-out moment in the poem for me. I love the way the poet renders the image of the leaves as part of a grander “ceremony,” illuminating the desire we have to make even “decay” beautiful. This same gesture occurs again, fittingly, in the last line and half of the poem where the world’s chaos (“this riot”) is held at bay by human will, through the act of “memory.” --Shara McCallum


Honorable Mention
a note to ms clifton
by Kiwanda Paul
PoetryCircle


if there be a history for salt
in a black woman’s vibrations

and there be a gathering of poet tribes
to carry a female name across water

and if there be an anthem to hum
for the making of old bones

and there be a single root ribboning
through dahomey soil towards my daughter’s hands

i say lucille if there be a truth
this be the time for you. you. you.

and your twelve fingers


Judge's Comments:
I was drawn to this elegy for the wonderful poet Lucille Clifton. The poem pays homage to Clifton by imitating her style and offering lines that are a kind of pastiche of those from Clifton’s own poetry, though revised and re-imagined in this context. The approach is a risky one that could fall flat but, instead, stands as a moving and fitting tribute. --Shara McCallum



 
 
 

Post Reply