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Lady Poverty
Sings in the gullies
To all you go without is added more as the years
Youth's face health certain friends then more and
so to get poorer
life's arrow—tapers thinner sharper
She always sang there to purify
not the desert always pure
but me of my corrupt furor
So losing more further along in this dream of
firstrate firmament fireworks—
consigned to roam above brown dirt occasional
maxilla, and be shaped badly—
twisted internally: join her truly
She's I
She should be
the shape of life is impoverishment—what
can that mean
except that loss is both beauty and knowledge—
has no face no eyes for
seasons of future delivery—rake the dirt
like Mrs. Miller used to
down at the corner had a desert yard and raked her dirt.
Beginning in poverty as a baby there is nothing
for one but another's food and warmth
should there ever be more
than a sort of leaning against and trust a food for
another from out of one—that would be
poverty—we're taught not to count on
anyone, to be rich,
youthful, empowered
but now I seem to know that the name of a self is poverty
that the pronoun I means such and that starting so
poorly, I can live
—Alice Notley
Co-Winner of The Shelley Memorial Award
Stone
What of that wolfhound at full stride?
What of the woman in technical dress
and the amber eye that serves as feral guide
and witness
to the snowy hive?
What of the singer robed in red
and frozen at mid-song
and the stone, its brokenness,
or the voice off-scene that says,
Note the dragonfly by the iris
but ask no questions of flight,
no questions of iridescence?
All of this
and the faint promise of a sleeve,
the shuttle’s course, the weave.
What of these?
What of that century, did you see it pass?
What of that wolfhound at your back?
—Michael Palmer
Co-Winner of The Shelley Memorial Award
Eve Speaks
Once I was in Eden and walked, blithely,
out of it.
How was I to know?
There seemed another Eden,
just next door. It looked familiar,
and I was tired of the new.
All day he strolled around with his name tags.
Glitter turned specific, but I craved
the blobbiness of things,
the inexact borders,
the possibility that this could also be
that. Of course I was an idiot. I'd run back
now, if I could, bear his painless
children, even call the girl If Only,
the boy, I Told You So.
Instead of living in this okay crowded world,
I'd make all my mistakes in Paradise.
Is that possible?
Is it?
I didn't even see the gate.
Then the gate closed.
—Jan Heller Levi
Winner of The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award
Flying Information
What's between them cannot be
said, although it has been held
between black marks and quoted
the way walls hold
the place we call temple
long after the roof's
given way. Gone
is what we say, but how
to quote what once was
there: departure,
arrival, on time. And how
to punctuate them
in a sentence, two
at each end, upright
but bent slightly like the fingers
of Christ—hard to say
whether he is giving
a blessing or quoting
the words he just spoke:
Benedictio latina.
And also with you.
(And I quote.)
Finger puppets engaged
in liturgy, quotation marks
were separated like the two halves
of the soul Plato named, forever nodding
to each other from opposite ends
of a sentence--and also with you--the distance
between them the same
as between the cow in the field
and the egret following closely, always
behind, waiting
just off to the side: still, white,
and hungry. What's in between them?
Only everything that can be said,
which is to say "nothing
comes close." (And I quote.)
And also with you: to bless,
to speak well of, to say well—
"well"—or at the benediction,
well said. According to Quintilian,
an orator preparing to speak
would holdup his hand, first
and second fingers extended, thumb
resting lightly on the curved
fourth and fifth. Not waving,
exactly. Schedule, delay,
missed connection, despite the signals
from the catcher and coach
on third. Here's something
quotable: "the swallowtail sings
chrysanthemum, zinnia,
sweet alyssum, while the bees
hold the bass note mums,
mums, mums." The antennae inscribe
the hieroglyph for quotation: sky
with pelicans, flying
in formation.
—Angie Estes
Winner of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award
[Untitled]
He wheeled a corpse into the narrow furnace, and said, there's something I want to show you.
He lit the gas, and the head rose from the table, the arms flew open and the body sat there
for a moment in the fire. The flesh peeled away from the bones, and the bones snapped and
burned with a fierce blue flame. When the oven had cooled and the door was opened, the
ashes and bits of bone threw off a pale, opalescent light. That light, he said, is what I
wanted you to see.
—Gary Young
Winner of the Lyric Poetry Award
HUMAN-HEADED BULL BELOW EMPTY SPACE
I.
On the lapis cylinders from 2900 BC images of the domestic
and the wild wrestle demons and musical instruments.
A human-headed bull braces a dulcimer while a bear plays and a fox
nestles at their feet. From my life, one scene inscribed
like that, so for twenty years a girl appears and re-appears
in dreams. I am a young nurse, crisp uniform, high-polished shoes,
carrying specimens that must be dropped off, when,
in the late after-hours of a cancer center, I get turned around.
I am lost somewhere in radiology.
I slow down. In each darkened room, huge
machinery, and radioactive danger signs. Just minutes before,
on the ward where I worked, I massaged the feet of a boy
with testicular cancer. I rubbed his arch, and on a sketch pad
he drew hands with charcoal. Precise lines he smeared
with his thumb. You know, I just thought I was bigger
than the other boys in gym class, he said, and added his own feet
to the drawing of my hands. Now the night has stopped itself
in this hall, and in my memory of him, the air is all enormous
cathedral. I turn left, and see a girl, whose back is to me,
standing before the new ultra-modern scanner, alone, arms outstretched,
her blue and white striped hospital robe, too large for her shoulders,
has fallen, and her hair, which I know will soon fall out, is luscious
and just barely reaches her hip. I watch her for how beautiful she is,
for how faithful she is to her position there, her arms held exactly,
for how she could be anyone, for how she could be me. The technician
arrives, directs me, directs her, and I resume the pace of someone found.
Some nights I dream I am photographing her, or painting her. And now
that I have seen the treasures of Ur, I dream I am carving her body
onto a lapis cylinder, then roll her onto parchment.
She is my link to a moment still before me in my life, before
I had cleaned the body of my father, newly-dead. A moment in which,
who I am is variable. I might have been the bear making music,
or the obedient human-headed bull supporting heavy strings.
But I have been frozen again. Mesmerized by my father's freckled skin
as I turn him to place below him, a clean sheet,
one the funeral workers can take with them. I love the way his vacant mouth
accepts his false teeth, I touch the black sores on both heels,
and the yellow, tobacco-stained nails of his right hand.
I carve the sight of him on my retina, roll him
across my cornea, his arms, like hers, once reaching out, now folded.
And I know, because I have never forgotten her, that this moment with him will
last, just the two of us, in the middle of the night, before I call anyone
to help. I sit down for a while, slide my hand under his, and watch.
II.
Because now I have raised her up. Because now I have laid him down.
I tell her story to a friend who writes.
Maybe he will want to take her, and I will be able to let go
the responsibility of her fate, which has tracked me through the years
like a lion. Or the boy, whose testicular tumor
grew to incorporate his brain. Instead, my friend tells me his vision,
a night when he watched a dog from his city window.
Framed by the building's edge, the alley's long line,
the light from an unknown source, moon maybe, streetlight, this dog
curled, was reduced to form, his head and tail equal and still.
He remembers. I remember. The dog as girl as my father as a boy
as witness. Obedience and repose. My father is a dog a girl a boy
a human-headed bull falling below empty space, and it occurs to me
that it is this which held us, this is what haunts, how we both saw,
for a moment, the empty space we are destined to fall through.
—Mary Jane Nealon
Winner of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award
Rhapsody
No one says it
anymore, my darling,
not to the green leaves
in March, not to the stars
backing up each night, certainly
not in the nest
of rapture, who
in the beginning was
an owl, rustling
just after silence, whose
very presence drew
a mob of birds—flickers,
finches, chickadees, five cardinals
to a tree—the way a word
excites its meanings. Who
cooks for you, it calls, Who looks
for you? Sheaf of feathers, chief
of bone, the owl stands
upon the branch, but does he
understand it, think my revel,
my banquet, my tumult,
delight? The Irish have a word
for what can't be
replaced: mavourneen, my
darling, second cousin once
removed of memory, what is not
forgotten, as truth was
defined by the Greeks.
It's the names
on the stones in the cemetery
that ring out like rungs
on a ladder or the past
tense of bells: Nathaniel Joy,
Elizabeth Joy, Amos
Joy and Wilder Joy,
and it all comes down
to the conclusion
of the cardinal: pretty, pretty, pretty
pretty—but pretty what?
In her strip search
of scripture, St. Teresa
was seized, my darling, rapt
amid the chatter
and flutter of well-coiffed
words, the owl
in the shagbark hickory,
and all the attending dangers
like physicians
of the heard.
—Angie Estes
Co-Winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award
Hand mit Ringen
—from Bertha Roentgen's hand X-ray
This is my bone bound with your ring.
Hinged in brevity my hand fans,
My skin is a requiem. Remember me 1896.
In the gesture I beckon:
Enter my ghost's corridor & shipwreck.
Crawl between the piping of my satin casket.
Here are the keys dangling from my pelvis-
Touch my skeleton.
This is the way into my darkness
Where I inhume the whalebone beneath
The window then nestle into the pine box bed
To shroud myself with the less
Gentle sex. Slamming doors, letting the wind
Blow through my legs. Skull & cross-
Bone mad. Here, I vanish
Only to arrive days later, disheveled.
The X-ray's predilection for cells
Out of place suits me. This debridement
Is better than the old cinch & buttress.
Exhume my first wanton hologram:
The rat's nest & glass eye, my ten charred nails.
I am radiant.
—Glori Simmons
Co-Winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award
Flowers for Ophelia
I.
The traditional choice
would be lilies—a symphony
of uncurling emptiness.
Their twisting lines present
a proud call-and-response
rising architecturally
above your fingers,
still redolent of rivers.
Pale spaces have no place
here, in your heavy disjunction.
Their arch beauty is not akin
to the calm that has settled
on your still tear-strained face
as you lie half-swallowed
in the merciless succor
of white.
II.
Rose of May you were,
passionately curled
and savior-seeking between sheets.
Perhaps angels were capable
of perceiving the opalescent blood
slipping unchecked and caught
by your trembling skin.
There's a wrapped secret on an aura
December with its wild thorns
could never comprehend or collapse,
and you slip inside
simple as a sip of water,
and in that shivering calm
what dreams may come
III.
Orchids mingled with
your opiate hair, and in
your dress, floating leaden
and enamored of your unmade form.
That purple was your steam,
made out of harshness
and gifted to you in a blank-breathed haze.
It shrouded its star-wrapped
victim in you, transfiguring
into a blossom-crying frost.
IV.
Falling violets filled the space
of your lost bones,
quaking you like an uncrossed sea.
No eau-de-vie can illuminate
those unpaled eyes, forging
a concave frame. The cry
of a newbroken child
can be no more misbegotten
than your coppery waterwithering.
V.
Wind had wintered you,
to find an echo in
a break of rosemary.
Stripped of marbled skin,
you must have been wrecked,
a lined supernaturate, perfumed
with a tangy scent
of past everlastings.
It calls back to you
willow-arched from,
lips parted perhaps
in a final aquatic inhalation,
or attempting to loose
one last raw chord:
cry rosemary, and I shall remember
past a thousand everlastings
—Margaret Wohl
Winner of the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award
The Power of in the Age of
I said well why not when confronted
with the sternness of a life ill-suited
to anything but conflict and conflation,
a derelict hole revolving mindlessly
before the matters of fact dictate terms
to those of us ill-used by truth and what-
not, garters and thongs awaver past dawn,
the mania for bargains breaking every
last one of the hungers (I mean hunters)
until the wax owns the car rents the road,
until the interest rates so highly the bank
manager offers to drive your small ones
to school and back as long as the principal
is up and running, though debt can grow
into its own form of tribute to plains and rivers,
the mountains between, beaches welling
at the edges—how they flank a billion passions
for cooking oneself under melanomic suns—
the remains of what you own being fucked
by what you owe, the dog spayed beyond
good breeding, and the darkest hours swelling
with intent to instill on a surface where
understanding cannot spawn but so often each day
and only then just so often,
as the boredom factor dishes out
more than any sane person can take
while another branch of worries is brought
to whomever is least able to cope
with being sucked off in front of his boss
or by his boss (taking that request for a raise
too far past the point of the request):
this business of ass and balls can wear down
a worker seeking sleep and dreamlessness
though the moon cutting through
the screen, the blinds must touch him here,
on his back, and here, on his arm, the one
that has worked its way from under
the sheet covering the bother he calls a body
and inching toward the end
of what everyone would call the bed,
lovely, the timing in my life is lovely
a line that stiffens through him
as he staggers downward into the sleep
he knows he needs but cannot,
desire for a moment desire's absence, a push
beneath the thoughts uncertain of the effect
they seek, but certain the effect, once achieved,
will attract whatever is needed from within.
—Brian Henry
Winner of the George Bogin Memorial Award
Log
Afternoon of slumber, logging dreams on the mind's rusty screen. Where did it come from,
that cartoon sleep of sawing timber? We lumber up from depths, wrestling with sun light,
uncrusting our eyes. An unrecognized timbre of voice loudly shouting something new, limber
of tongue, loose of syllogism. Don't rest, write it down. We're up to no good, barking up
the wrong tree. That story where Wynken, Blynken and Nod sailed off through the sky in a
wooden clog, star lit, issuing forth sleepy-headedly. The recording angel's lost her book,
deeply sleeping the day away in dreams of woods, those papery trees, everything rustling.
Seize
I'll tell you sometime when we're vis à vis about the ease of memorizing dynasties, how
Tang, the apogee, floats into Sung, the pedigrees of poets, those liquid trees in scrolls,
eerie in the fog, or snow covered bamboo teasing us with thoughts of Spring. We're on our
knees trying to take in time, wider than Lake Erie; you sneezed, we tried to squeeze it,
don't believe it, my freezing carp of the day.
—Alice Jones
Co-Winner of the Robert H. Winner Award
Boundaries of Seeing
for Judy
The temptation is to watch the clouds,
swollen with moonlight, drift
across the night sky, a migrating
Herd of leviathans, but if
you lie spread open on the earth
long enough and focus
between them, you may see
the clouds slow, the obsidian
depth behind them ease
into motion, and sense yourself,
in a parallel gesture, begin
to accelerate, until like
the twin runners of a dogsled,
you and the night sky
are reeling along the luminous track
of frozen cloud. Once,
white men trundled a projector
over the tundra, as only
white men would do,
and splashed a movie across
the igloo's breath-sheened wall:
black-and-white people raced
to and fro, making
overblown gestures to make up
for the lack of sound. What
did they see, the Eskimos,
polite enough to feign a chuckle
when the visitors slapped their knees
and, when the film came
flapping to a halt, to praise
the shifting abstract patterns,
how with such slow grace
they drifted and swam
across the igloo's starry dome
like the breath of the Aurora,
they said,
in the cupped hands of the night sky.
—Jeffrey Franklin
Co-winner of the Robert H. Winner Award
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