Karen's Pub Competition: Love Poetry for CynicsSharon Taylor
The ChallengeSharon TaylorWe all know love poetry is despised, reviled, just plain ol' hated. Nobody likes a smartass, and love poetry is just so damned smarmy and smug. Haha, I'm in love and you're not. There's a trick to writing good love poetry, I'm sure of it. For instance, Jim Hayes, Larry Fontenot, and others have been able to consistently knock homers out of the park, while I struggle with each smarmy word. How do they do that? Cynics, start your engines. Please give me a serious love poem, even if you hate love. The prize is a five dollar blank book with handmade rice paper and crazy-colored binding.
Seriously, Official Contest Rules 1.) Limit two entries per poet/contestant, regardless of whether poems are original or third-party. Please note on your entry if it is original or third-party. 2.) No previously published or e-zined work, although previously workshopped pieces are acceptable. 3.) If your submission is something you really want critiqued, please post it in "Poetry" and the Gazebans will have their way with it. However, you cannot post revisions of your entry for consideration in this contest and expect to win. 4.) Prize is the above-mentioned cool blank book from Nepal, bought wholesale from the very hippie who arranged for its export. 5.) Deadline is December 24, 2000 at 11pm Central Standard time. 6.) Winners will receive prize by US Postal Service sometime after New Year's Day. 7.) Love poetry from any point of view is acceptable, but submissions must be a true-to-life, serious attempt at good poetry. No Juice of Love Girl. And I mean that. The Entries(In order of appearance)
M.E. Hope - Third Party Poem: Love Sonnet XI by Pablo Neruda I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue. Anthony Robinson - Late Letter You were simple, destroyed as morning— and the complicit afternoon—who understood needing something so badly. After just enough interference, a wide crosshatch of wavy straws fallen over the lake, and 4 a.m. lovemaking, three Canadian geese swept into view. Then the news: a paperboy—white, fifteen—spirals up the walk, leaves his testament. The sun seemed so much bigger—so much more demanding that morning—as if it would swallow us both, then laughing, step aside. Men and women ran alongside our river and then, each other while the mole on your shoulder spread. That place, my love, the tiny spot a thing but watch. You were ruined: small, beautiful negative— roar growing louder until— I couldn’t see a woman there. Steam— the shower—sealed me back inside the wretched day, the beauty slowly stifling. Wes Jarrell - A Love Poem Poetry is little good for more-- Love has been bloodied by the art. Sonnets, praising the fair, have more in store Than modern writers' brains expunge. Perfect pastoral nymph-dreams were outgrown Before even sonnets were known, And form-free verses have whipped to exhaust The mule of love-struck allusion. Indeed, the romantics have lived and died. Eric Woodgates - A Love Poem Our foundation crumbles. Concrete spalls wide cracks, stucco falls in flaky tears. Serious and costly repair: jack the floor, lay new forms, fill with stone and clay, then slather the whole in several coats of paint. Breathe easy, honey. It is only the foundation of a house. Carol Taylor - Third Part Poem: Love Poem by John Frederick Nims My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases, at whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring, whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen, and have no cunning with any soft thing Except all ill at ease fidgeting people: the refugee uncertain at the door you make at home; deftly you steady the drunk clambering on his undulant floor. Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror, shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime yet leaping before red apoplectic streetcars-- misfit in any space. And never on time. A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only with words and people and love you move at ease. In traffic of wit expertly manoeuvre and keep us, all devotion, at your knees. Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel, your lipstick grinning on our coat, so gayly in love's unbreakable heaven Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float. Be with me darling early and late. Smash glasses-- I will study wry music for your sake. For should your hands drop white and empty all the toys in the world would break. Rebecca Loudon - Wedding Dinner They eat meat in marital zest. She pulls skin from chicken with tiny white teeth chin greased and dimpled, eyes sunk deep in her face. Plump hands turn bones over and over, pluck sinew and tendon like piano strings. He eats from left to right, a slight compulsion. Cleans every clump, sops each spot of juice. Scallops, veal smashed into ovals wet with gravy slide viscous down his dark throat. He presses his face close, red tongue lolling at the pewter plate. Two at the table crack spine, peel shells, chew through webbed skin, splinter bone letting all the blood spill into silver cups. John Laughland - Things Are Much The Same Things are much the same. That first night, long ago we sat at the water's edge made ripples, kissed and whispered. As night came and the chill, we rose, stretched and trudged up the beach to the camp. That was years and years ago, but I remember each moment and savour them. The tent of course is long gone and we seldom see the beach these days. Come to think we don't kiss a lot these days, but between us I think it's fair to say that things are much the same, yes, things are much the same. Ron Jones - Thangs In Town I see you strolling in the rain tonight hair all in tangles, lurch up the street under the white eye of a streetlamp, you ain’t walkin’ right. George (geo) - Untitled I pull to loosen and remove the thin, black bow knotted above the hollow of her neck as she goes on about the structure of relationships based on service; class delineations really piss her off, she rails. If I fail to follow, am more consumed by her fertile than febrile cloud, by the acrid fog of a woman who works, hard, she little notices, absorbed in the intricacies of undressing. Beneath a narrow poplin fold running the length of lapels in her shirtwaist, the buttons of a tuxedo blouse are small and hard white as ivory; squared, they must be pinched and pushed through the holes. A lover of rhetoric in stockinged feet: "Are the oranges atop the heap more desirable, or are they simply more desirable atop the heap?" she polls and rolls flesh tones down as her mother taught. Conscious now only of the elation in proximity, in formal, ritual procedure, with deference, in ardor, I defer opinion, nearly drunken with lifting her black, frail, pleated, crepe skirt. George (geo) Untitled 2 One in of many on (Doors, Houses, Streets) opens this elastic Spring a.m. emits into the nascent street, demisted and crisped with newly shaped edges, yourself As creation assumes dimension and I a fresh shirt to stand, awakened at the window, on the edge of the pearl and in translucent light, await yourself. Of a sudden, the pewtered street below erupts into silence laced with ringing steps doppling imperceptibly upward. Cautiously leaning from one of many, I catch yourself, pressed against the new sun; one... individually absolute. Carolyn Smale - Bee In My Bonnet, Sonnet There’s something bzzzing in my lover’s brain, he leans his neck against my ear, I hear wondrous whirring near his jugular vein, his humming breaths – my coeur’s bombardier! This tickling whizz, to be here in his arms, my bona fide, he bombilates and bomb– binates, a one man band of the spheres– alarms in all the mornings – muffled – next to him. Feeds me homespun sugar from white lilies, his fingers purring as he weaves the grain, says “I’m taking Anne to the Antilles, do you think you could drive us to the ‘plane?” Alone, here, at the end of my sonnet, I discover – a bee – in my bonnet. Larry Fontenot - Grass A man is known by the lawn he mows, so I slip into loose jeans and grass-stained shoes, murderer’s clothes left over summer to summer. I march out, and submit the grass to arrogant whirling blades. As I walk among the fallen, I gather strength in the notion that each stalk will rise, that each blade is unbowed though clipped. It is the duty of grass to survive, to taunt landowners, like a growling dog safe behind a fence. I take the smell of St. Augustine with me through the back door into the kitchen where you sit reading the Saturday paper. There is a curious mix of aromas when we meet. You wrinkle your nose, say I smell bad, and I say, “Evil?” and you smile and we each strip a piece of clothing from the other’s body until we are down to nothing but the smell itself, down to skin where no grass grows, down to where what fits survives, where I place my tongue deep into your watermelon pussy. Ron Jones - Harvest Marie, Today I opened the cupboard to get change for the laundry. Your mother’s lead crystal bowl jumped out, fell onto the blue willow plate, the one with the chocolate chip cookies. The couple downstairs were at it again last night, yelling, slamming doors until the house shook. She took off in the pickup. Gravel sprayed against siding like a quick burst from an assault weapon. I hit the deck. Someday, he'll kill her. Damn this drive-by neighborhood. It must have been 2:30 I woke to hear, "Cunt. Whore." I dialed 911. He was naked in the crisp autumn air, bathed in flat copper light. Stumbling, whirling around, a tv under one arm. He flung it like a discus into the dark where it landed and bounced shedding its plastic case as it rolled. The cops put him to bed with a warning. The bowl had vibrated to the front of the shelf. Glass, cookies, china, lay in pieces at my feet, another busted dream. I swept up and took the trash to the curb. At the Laundromat sun shines through plate glass windows. I think about our working opposite shifts, living at opposite poles, how this is only temporary, how someday we'll do better, get our heads above water. I'm folding your under things when I catch an old man’s stare. The coffee is fresh, the dishes are clean. Someday we'll live in a house surrounded by tall trees. We'll hang our wash on a line, take it down, fold it carefully together. Davida Chazan - A Non-"Love Sonnet" Your sonnet needs a velvet, perfumed rose or honeyed rhyme and mornings dipped in dew, but cynic I, could never so impose my sentimental dregs on one like you. Perhaps I find it saccharin for me to bleed my heart upon this yellowed page in flowing rhythm likened to the sea, or maybe time has jaded me with age. For my attempts romantically to wane are total failures, dragging at my hand and futile efforts screaming out my pain. Remember this is not as I had planned. My words romantic stay behind closed doors, but this do trust: my love is always yours. Brett Thibault - Going Deeper December’s blank, dry grass riced with snow: the page turned, July’s green letters ghosting. Day is night capsized: the blue bottom blocks the hull; the bright barnacles. The face is rugged terrain. Iris bloom despite the lash of vulcan ire; eruptions above the gush. In the boiler room, the heart stains bricks rose, its skin straining to contain a crucible. ME Hope - Third Party Poem: Passing Remark by William Stafford In scenery I like flat country. In life I don't like much to happen. In personalities I like mild colorless people. And in colors I prefer gray and brown. My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains, says, "Then why did you choose me?" Mildly I lower my brown eyes— there are so many things admirable people do not understand. Fiona Maria Eustathiades - Pacific Where sun meets sea meets sky there is no line. Light's a bowl surrounding breath and feeling. The moon gives me a sea as dark as wine Where stars float free in depths, sparks annealing. Glinting coins, flying ashes, eyes that peer, reflect, and glitter back to me from waves that roll and tumble rich as velveteen, and carry love and dreams towards betrayal. I see and taste again your varied lies. I see and taste again your gentle kiss. I hear again our loves' deep-throated cries. I hear again the rain falling like mist. Gold light, honeyed sweet and ocean bitter remembered, sifting memory's litter. Julie Carter - Twin Blades I ran upstairs and found a shaven man reclining where no shaven men should be, and said, "Who are you; what are you to me?" He laughed and said, "Your husband." He had planned to gift me with a face I'd never seen, his own, scraped clean and close, with just a nick below his nose. A rash too red and thick was springing up; a razor hadn't been within two inches of his rounded chin for twenty years. I stared at him in vain to find the man I wed. This is the place where old romances end and new begin, as unfamiliar skin reveals its plane and I must learn to love another face. Heather Long - Breaking Ground Come, let's gather Sunday around us. This light won't stay for long and we awaken slowly to consequences. You spoke in tongues again and I heard a nightingale's promise. Let's take a skiff to the island, climb those hills that look like small breasts – mine perhaps; or find a place without reminders. Mondays are cold. I want the sins of Sunday to warm my week; our fingers to speak a selfish language. Susan Vaughan - TEEN ANGEL - A Radio Poem That old locomotive Sneaks up on them lovers As they sit discussing the earth and the stars, They don't hear the whistle, They don't feel the tracks shake And here comes the Red-Eye with seventeen cars. (Chorus): Oh, rockabye warble, oh class rings sent flying, Oh last tender kisses in love and despair, Oh girls sent to heaven for riding jalopies On train tracks and just sitting there. "Hey, get off them train tracks!" The engineer hollers, And puckers his pug nose with wind in his eyes, "Say, get off them train tracks!" Shouts old Chief Bandanna But Danny's too busy and Judy just sighs. (repeat chorus) Well, they keep on hollering out of them windows, But then when they get there they just shut their eyes, The girl hits the windshield, The boy hits the bottle And all of the high notes besides. (repeat chorus) Carolyn Smale - Image Shawled mirrors stand like liquid bombs, myth’s horsted meniscus, whole. Incidence – spectres painted onto silken clowns, and cherubs built from poodle hair. Equivalence – echoes– all or nothing- they appear unconscious shadows of ions or row after row gleaming – pitching scarred copies into the pit. I reach–– by calculus– your unfunded limit, of truth. Howard Miller - Desperation Sonnet on Forgetting Valentine's Day February 14, 11:57 p. m. I'm told I better darn quick write a sonnet that's all about my wedded bliss, my love; demands like this are tough to meet, doggone it, and lead me to bog down, a car in mud. My normal course, urged by testosterone, is bull it out;, so, pedal fully flat, I watch as geysered muck in arching rain coats fence posts, shrub, two trees, and nearby calf. I wish I'd never left my daily track to get stuck in this unfamiliar place; there's nothing left to do but call a truck to get myself pulled out and back home safe. I hope this metaphor will let you know it's always you I turn to for a tow. Sharon Taylor - Third Party Poem: The Kiss by Donald Hall The backs twist with the kiss and the mouth which is the hurt and the green depth of it holds plainly the hour. The aim loses its lie. We are victims, and we shift in the cloyed wind, the dark harm. No, in the thick of rubbed numbness, and we are the winter of the air, and the not-nothing, blurred, bound, motion declared. At night, wound in the clothes of the groomed and unendured, where the five hands of wire rasp, hurt me, and fold, we love. Love is a kiss which adheres like the feet of a green lizard to walls whole days, and is gone. Sharon Taylor - Third Party Poem: Gold by Donald Hall Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies. yellow roses pressing from a clear bowl. All day we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep gold of your thighs and your back. We slept and woke entering the golden room together, lay down in the breathing quickly, then slowly again, caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily touching my hair now. We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years, shining and whole. Rodney Armstrong - early Autumn She comes to me in the place where the traces of gilding linger to share embers on a cooling hearth and feel the downward tug of slow, sure passing. Rodney Armstrong - Advance A crisp itch of ivy creeps beyond the tree line where we picnic, where my pleas and your surrender meet with folly. Eden - Love Wrap your hand around my finger, Leave a mark of indifference. Think of me. Eden - Relationship A fogged up window, too cold outside. Davida Chazan - For the Love of Poets With our written line connection, like a verb of sheer perfection; every comma falls like rain from cloudless skies. Where a sentence can fulfill us, or a point left out to chill us; fearing thoughts that slip between the empty lines. Finding adjectives of splendor, or an image to remember; letting words dissolve to letters then to sighs. Then each phrase will sing in chorus, heady adverbs will adore us, in a glorious conjunction of two lives. Larry Fontenot - Cold Sheets Cold sheets slick as ice twice folded over lovers clumped in quick frost her hips disapproving his icepick entry sleek as icicles hung from trees in winters snow angels carved in cool tunnels mouths of worn out words meaning the same always the same burnt inside but never warm tightly wound now spinning free to burst the bottle spray his offering into her icebox shelf he, floating in coital glacier she, waiting for the light to come on when the porcelain door opens. Patricia Wallace Jones - If Not You Who will stay with me in a room stripped but not clean of vomit and urine; sit cold on tile for 24 hours to hold me along side my seizing, seething child? If not you, when the ward sleeps drugged and forgotten, who will whisper Heh heh heh, little girl, wanna fuck? make me laugh out loud in hopeless enclosure? Fiona Maria Eustathiades - Lachrymosa, or The Sailor's Lament The sea has taken to her breast her loving, her beloved son. The sea has taken to his final rest my beloved, my loving one. And the wind wails in the rigging as the waves lash at the shore, and the only ones that are out there won't be coming home no more. Trees dance at the clifftop, tortured by the gale, and the rain falls like teardrops on roof and window pane. And the sea moves through the rigging as she lies sunk with all hands, and those who are still out there won't be coming back to land. Sailors' wives and sweethearts stand huddled on the shore. As they watch the ship, she parts from the sight of land evermore. So, skyblue eyes that laughed with love won't laugh with me again. He's joined the legions of the dead, I'm still in the world of men. And the sea moves through the rigging as their bones rock with the waves, and those who are still living learn forgiveness of the brave. So, skyblue eyes that laughed with love won't laugh with me again. He's joined the legions of the dead, I'm still in the world of men. And the wind wails in the rigging as the waves lash at the shore, and the only ones that are out there now won't be coming home no more, o no, and the only ones that are out there now won't be coming home no more. M.E. Hope - Take off your shoes What is that plant that dredges roots into arid soil teasing the desert’s mantle. It secretes its secrets to the heat quivering with every brush of breath and then bursts into flame. The name sits at the back of my tongue as I follow your track, touch as though set on sacred ground, coaxing mystery and covenant under the hush of breath, lips close in to ignite. M.E. Hope - Drums Friends murmur ”this won’t last” as though daring us to fall into the cliché of opposites that soon scatter like swallows’ flight. Our tightly stretched hearts drum the whispers to dust: the reason we love is as inconsequential as the shallow husk of the moon on dawn’s eye. Except to us -- bearing the correspondent weight of gravity’s pull -- day and night call equally. Eric Woodgates - Perigree When she strolls into the living room on a bright mid-winter afternoon, the world is rendered lightless in contrast. Air rises, warmed to convection. The dog seeks shade beneath our damp sofa. Those prone to superstition fear she may have swallowed a white giant. Outside, more rational beings gather to the radiant windows. Like me, they have wearied of the dull sun. Susan Vaughan - Everyone's Secret It's as stupid as hell, like sending Money through the mail. Still the heart flies out again, For no one can remember That other procedure Till it happens: letting go, Whose steps veer off in inaccessible midbrain. For that reason, obviously, A clear notation has never been devised, Though everyone notes That, done in good time, It resembles the ritual dance of a savaged nation, Repeated exactly at every performance Yet each time suggesting through subtle variations on the blink A different despair. Shann Palmer - You never shop at Walmart Not you, not even for the last Mohican or fifty-percent off Ghiradelli. You’re Armani smooth, Jaguar fast, Garcia tied, slipped into your driving gloves I let you take me there and there and even there. But never to WalMart or Target, Burger King or Pizza Hut, we did Krispy Kreme just once, for nostalgia’s sake, you said, and put a fifty in the Red Cross Box licked the custard from my lips The big black lady behind the counter said, “Whooo-ey! Ain’t that sump’in!” you carried me to the car. Tonight, your voice echoed in the shoe department, tumbling weak, breath stuck, nose against new plastic and cardboard boxes, curious, I was ashamed, wanting to see you if you couldn’t see me. Running aisles, tackling end displays, frantic, reduced to screaming your name, I wanted doors locked, exits secured. My hands held firm by the security guards, one of them was wearing your scent. Or maybe not. Wes Jarrell - The Conquerers Children mingled with the air that summer As we searched out untouched places. Hands gripped, we strode down dirt alleys; The wind would playfully lash her curls As she drove, looking for a quiet place To own. We thought we were conquerers: To us, all light that splashed the earth Depended on our happiness. Kisses and silent moments, Light and nervous, led each day, As we walked further into fall. Heather Long - Osmosis Open your eyes come morning and you'll not know the woman beside you. Each night, I absorb the day I've just lived and become more than what I was. I want to watch your face, trace your awakened delight with my new fingers. Wes Hyde - Untitled He worked miracles with bicycle bolts, knots, and mystery dishes from the stove, kept a journal of thoughts too personal to share. Sometimes I would come home from school to find him folding my best clothes or wiping away the lunch-time crumbs like the shame of another lost job. At fourteen I worked full-time; indifferent to the man who taught me the value of a human soul and made my bed as well. This morning he called to wake me, shared his ideas over coffee. As he talked, I thought of his discarded journal, the passages about hungry children and questions asked of God. Crackling bacon and wood, carefully gathered during summer months, drew my children from their rooms; I recalled the words of Robert Hayden: "What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?" Wes Hyde - The Waste Land Baptism Did Eliot have a plan when writing The Waste Land, or did he feel his way through passages of cruel months, roots, branches and the Unreal City? I’ve never been there. I’ve been to Alaska. I can imagine nothing more unreal than snow, mountains, silence, Aurora Borealis and the cracking air. I was three, perhaps four, and my only real memory is of frostbite. There is no wind in Fairbanks. “Fear death by water,” he wrote. Fear death by water. I remember the lights in your window the year my father found a real job. You were sixteen and make-up was an art; I bought cologne to impress you, but you only laughed when I sneezed. My car was always running out of gas. I wrote my fears on paper: a list of lost cassettes, highways and wet matches. I don’t remember the year. Another list at the base of Bradshaw Mountain, I drove to the top, burned them, offered their bodies to the wind. I imagined your blue Cutlass. We celebrated celibacy, had all night discussions on the use of contraceptives, named unborn children awaiting marriage; this is how I remember you, looking for gas cans and deserted phone booths at midnight. These lists, always these cruel lists. They brighten the flame of memory with tired lines and images used too often. I remember forcing the rhyme to please you. I remember going hungry. Mrs. Sutton dabbled in real estate, rented to my father. The bathroom was rustic, outdoors and seldom workable. Four 12’ x 12’ rooms, and my mother said we were fortunate, heat or not. Winters are harsh when you’re poor. We looked forward to watermelons. Thou shall not steal: one of ten my father preached from the pulpit. The congregation said, “Amen,” and stopped off for communion on the way home. It was one way of giving tithes. I took what was needed when no one watched, rejected the religion of my youth, made plans for 18 and moving westward. It rained a lot that year. Then I met you. The sign read, ‘Live Music Tonight!’ I stopped in, found salvation in a storefront church. The congregation shouted, “Hallelujah,” when I was baptized, changed into their swim-suits and had a pool party. It was Phoenix, 98 degrees at 10:PM with asphalt running through my veins. I had no idea where I was going or what I would do when I got there: that was growing up. Love was a can of cola at the end of a long walk. We held hands, matched our steps— tried to time our heartbeats together. I still remember what you were wearing the night we met. The music was loud; rewritten songs from Van Halen and Bad Company; I had never heard gospel like that. I went home and prayed, put you down on canvas, learned to sleep on the right side of my bed. Earthquake Damages “Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu” A mockery? A fragment shored against ruins? I lost you. Cactus rarely grows in Phoenix. They plant eucalyptus and grass, import water from California, kill the air. I threw away my rhyming dictionary, forgot the ocean, grew my hair long. They told us the rooms were free. Lynn said, “Working in the Tenderloin, they should be.” He negotiated the price of labor but never signed a contract. San Francisco is a long way from Disneyland, but you always talked about going there. My mother gave me the gun, insisted that I take it. I should have taken a crucifix, quoted from the Bible, stayed out of jail. I was asked if I wanted a queer cell or a straight one: they gave me a razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and a condom in case I changed my mind. The contractor never did pay us, never found the tools we hid inside the walls— they searched the car, found the gun in my suitcase. I told you California was nice that time of year; told you I was going to church, not to worry. I never was a good liar. You felt you couldn’t love me, thought I shouldn’t love you in return. Hell This is the paper that was her eyes: Majora: a page mixing the pulp of madness with palpable silence. This is a vein of prose where she curled on the sill behind Roget’s making comparison of tears. Minora: delicate rice, haiku, a dog-eared page of Fleurs du Mal. I was in love with the words, picked her up at her father’s door, drove into the desert, wrote sonnets. I secretly slapped Chagal’s goat for rituals of ink and poorly tuned violins. Chagal understood love, deified it, gave shape to four-leafed suffering. The fiddler plays and I pay in waltzes, sometimes in tangos; a black rose in her teeth, the flesh of memory gone. I open my eyes to bones and ashes; sift the soot for tears. 3 AM Love dreamt of being while I slept, dreaming of dreaming of dreaming of… Stones about my neck sink like shadows and fall like wanting toward warmth. I moved into a new apartment. Today, I feel the need to paint again. There are no stuccoed walls or Spanish tile; the neighbors look at me suspiciously, lock their doors. It was while I unpacked I found your memory. The box was labeled, ‘FRAGILE’, and I had taken a marker and written, ‘Do Not Open!’ in bold black strokes. I don’t know why I kept the box. I don’t know why, after all this time, I opened it. Cathy, I woke up breathing your name; it was your absence that woke me, and I rolled into the warm depression of your leaving. I now avoid mountaintops, dream on egg shells, fight back papier-mache eyes with citron candles. I’m a believer, I don’t have to convince myself— I loved you. The Left Side of the Bed Billy makes six figures now, insists I call him Bill. We shopped for America on the other side of curtains, spent nights in pursuit of our dreams, drank coffee in the mornings with the same crush on the same girl. Billy calls me on weekends, tells me how his boys are doing, that he loves his wife. His daughter from a previous marriage is coming to visit next week. I’m still trying to paint Cathy. I need to clean my apartment. There are at least a dozen empty cola cans waiting to be thrown away, a glass of milk souring on the coffee table, mail to be opened. I don’t know why I haven’t thrown away the box of tampons left beneath the bathroom sink. Later, I’ll go buy more paints and a new ¼ inch brush. I need to bleed this asphalt from my veins. After all these years of matchbooks and misguided roses, I look back for her reflection in my mirror, buy flowers that blacken on the kitchen counter, hear her voice when I’m alone, sleep on one side of my bed—moths come in at night; I have no screens, only this candle. I may never return her books to the library or open another Bible. I think Eliot had a plan when he wrote The Waste Land. I’m told that Pound reworked the poem, that the original is enshrined at the public library on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Jennifer Reeser - Why It Wasn't You So tender were you in the love you made to me, so slow against that chilly piece of midnight -- all the house at rest, afraid to sigh or settle, lest your patience cease -- the walls themselves continued up, without the slightest tremor at your gentle hand, and no such fate as may squeeze faith from doubt could hear those words you breathed, or understand. So tender were you in your love to me, but so inured was I to indiscretion, outside, the rousing remnants of the sea drowned out its cry, and I its soft confession, even as your selfless body drowned the skin that housed my heart, and whose love hid within. Rebecca Loudon - Sorrento You ratchet everything with the edge of your tongue, make tidy sums of clothing, wool, coins that rattle, buttons in a paper cone. My arms fold like cranes. I’m suddenly aware of commas standing up, shouting on my skin. Oh! an afternoon in cotton sheets, abalone combs slipped into into my hair, all the branches of your body astonished in my hands. Shann Palmer - Three Peeks in a Time Machine 1. Solar Eclipse Country curtained unbleached linen sky hangs out in false dawn fear of forgetting what the sun looked like before humankind ate the big apple. Which came first- mother’s milk or pie? Kiss me now when the light returns surface imperfections will distract you’re lips to gossip ears predator culling the weak. 2. Hurricane’s Eye mad companion sit with me the afternoon is too much to squander time is not a sin we can think of a better one together. 3. Lunar Eclipse You forgot to breathe and died before me laying your confession on the cold quilt your mother made you what she could do from the grave I am cradled in the fading light for giving. Jamie Wasserman - Snow Angels Tonight, church bells announce another celebration. Old women pass under my window whispering "holy, holy," counting rosaries on knuckles red with cold. For hours, a snow fine as ash has fallen but nothing is accumulating. An entire season separates you and I-- snow is not something you are ready to accept. An ocean away, you sit quietly stirring Pennyroyal tea waiting for the leaves to settle into a new future. Outside your window, blue stars, the last holdouts from an unexpected heatwave rearrange in preparation for the Fall equinox. This should be a time of transformation, like in summer when Venus fell into the house of Jupiter and sweat clung to our skin like guilt. Our long nights in bed became a series of sacraments; the laying on of hands, the practice of a simple kiss across a forehead. But tonight the sky is full and white and not a single star can slip through. This distance is what I must believe in. I feel your absence like an ache in my palm and there is nothing to do but wait for snow to gather. If enough falls I will go outside, spread my arms on the ground and stretch my neck to the sky, mouthing your name, holding it on my tongue like communion, letting go of the syllables slow as the walk home from midnight mass. Patricia Wallace Jones - Tell Me I ask you-- you who are so good as Baez said-- to tell me again about Glastonbury Tor, the footpaths and heather and Chalice Well gardens whose seeds we know will not flower for me. I ask you once more to draw me with poetry the Gog and Magog, her sacred oaks and Bride's Mound fire. Then on a night with her circle complete, plated in silver above a white spring, let me drink it all in while you tell me anew-- not about love-- but what I'm in love with you means. Mitchell Newbury (Don Taylor) - Ashes Cool Her walk to the spring, my love for pastry puffing said enough for me to marry. She laughed, called me a romantic fool. I was -- a fool sugared by emendations glazed, glosses palata-blized. I pressed my face to her bakery window, felt only a few pennies in my pockets. # Broke, our love grew like corn to detassel; what we shucked made Farmland seed. Old machines said plant here another year; orchard blight said leave next spring -- we moved to Montana in '63. # That old broom? I laughed when she flung it off the porch, after swats at two bats. Said she imagined fleas hopping, little bugs flying directly from the air to demesne between her legs. Frail kerosene lamps at low wick kept me at my extermination work long past midnight. # I took a load of cows to stockyards in Billings, stayed a few extra days. She looked for faces in hick-ry ashes cooling in the stove. Lonely farm wives do that a lot -- look in stoves. She said once she saw a girl chasing a man chasing his hat. She poked through the embers and cried. I imagine old hats roll across bluestem pasture and frolic with tumbleweed -- until they catch on girl's barbed wire. I don't know what my hat will do there, except flap and tear, blow on again -- maybe catch up with that tumbleweed. The Winners(Judges: John Boddie, Jim Hayes)
John Boddie writes: This has been a wonderful experience, although the task of selecting a winner was very difficult. The poems submitted were all of very high quality, and those of your who have read through them all have no doubt been astonished, as I was, at the wide range of approaches to the straightforward topic of “Love.” I have seen a couple of these before, and they are already in my keeper file. There were a number of fresh poems as well, marvelous and inventive. A few of these have joined the previous keepers. Ron Jones had the right idea when he asked for permission to print these out and use them as a gift. This is a collection I would pay good money for and read with the conviction that my purchase was an inspired one. Jim and I reviewed the poems submitted independently and found that we were in agreement on nine of our individual “top tens.” I’m very surprised because not much differentiated my “top ten” from the others.
In announcing the award, we felt it was only proper to recognize contributions in
several categories, and these are included.
The Authors & The Alsop Review
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