Judge Brian Teare has selected the winners of the fourth annual Littoral Press Poetry Prize: Meredith Stricker has won the contest. A broadside of her winning poem, “Inhabited by Your Absence,” will be produced this fall in an edition of 50 copies. Honorable Mentions were awarded to Martha Ronk for “No sky,” and to Michael Klein for his two poems “The Poet” and “Cartography” (the first time a poet has received two of the three honorable mentions!). Congratulations to the winners. Many thanks to the judge and to all who entered. The caliber of the entries was higher than ever this year. Next year’s deadline will be mid-August. Check back here or in the summer 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine for guidelines.
INHABITED BY YOUR ABSENCE
~ only one complete poem survives Sappho’s nine books of lyrics ~
plowed field just at sunset
stones, black sea urchins, sand
the wash of salt
candles, soap, white cup from the trellised marketplace
bells, counting aloud
everywhere your words have been torn away
scant shelter of thistles, thin rain, shadow puppets, the moon
yellow over blue Asia Minor
each fragment –– a lacuna of perception –– shadows the unseen
clear glass of water, the sound of waves
transparent as olive groves
drawing light into their leaves and fruit
there are so many places to find you
in the endless
white spaces you have left us
Meredith Stricker
No sky
After Robert Adams’s California Views
No sky a gray backdrop merely and absence
and below: the scraggle of dusty fronds, the scrub oak and scrub jay
whose abrasive noises sharpen in response.
Shadows proliferate in deep furrows no sky above
merely a scrim registering conical thrusts, a heightened flurry &
outlines of branches, the dead ones slowly petering out.
magnificent ruin the cut through the field blasted chaparral
As I understand my job, it is, while suggesting order, to make things appear as much as possible
to be the way they are in normal vision.
An unvoiced series of sentences, without articulation,
with gray shapes, formulating a syntax loosening and then tightening from edge to edge.
The frame sets a border down from which a thin straggle hangs at random &
like purposeful intrusion, and so unlike
and the interstate (in the title) missing from the photograph itself
merely a dry riverbed, the density of shadows trapped in the confusion
of bush and bush-like tree
except from higher up than the rest, its thin trunk arched against
no sky
colorless, less often remarked upon, appositely emotionless these days,
a relic, like the fan palm living at the edges of water.
Martha Ronk
The poet
for Mary Ruefle
I’m putting your book by itself so it won’t
get mixed in with the usual stuff and the other books I have
to carry around every day like a common laborer
who is always hungry to see something finished and only sees
the empty field with the wind thrown over it.
I am lonely and tired and it seems that I’ve always left the game
too early and can’t remember now
what it was I found in a field in Bennington, Vermont
that qualified as being totally mojo enough to be used in a spell to make
another man love me. It didn’t even work.
I was dancing then. The whole world was dancing.
Or in love with people who looked like dancers.
And you were there before your book got written.
And this idea to remain anonymous was there, too, abiding us with mercy.
And somebody said: Don’t get captured.
And we looked up and said the same thing to what we thought was the future
there, with its heartbroken electric eye, filming us from the sky.
Michael Klein
Cartography
I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted,
impoverished—especially in snow when it returns it to black and white.
And sometimes I look and see nothing—
but the elementary smoke rising
from a human village, over-populated,
and yet under-made. A woman from there is walking along the side of the road
to the next village where she can live without burning.
She’s a story I make up to go with the map
Andrew shows me of a place I’ve never been.
Without the story, I can’t make
a meaning for the flat and lettered picture of a place.
He said, he can’t believe I don’t just see a map
for what it is or see a tree being just a tree.
Sometimes, that’s where our two spirits part.
I want to think the world moves just enough beyond
the name for what is holding it in and he wants to think it’s not going anywhere.
Michael Klein