Many thanks to all who entered the broadside contest. The final judge, Stephen Kessler, has selected the winner from 141 submitted poems: “Feral Creature of the IRT” by Deborah Friedman. Eight honorable mentions were also awarded:
Musée Mecanique, Haines Eason
Water Child, R.G. Evans
Joy Odes, Mary Fitzpatrick
AP Photo: Two Rwandan Women Reunited in a Church in Kabiza, 1997, Lorraine Healy
The Poet to Her Poem, Christina Hutchins
Architect, Amy MacLennan
The Conservation of Matter, Meryl Natchez
Dusk at Death Valley, Heather Winterer
I am pleased to present all of these wonderful poems here. The winning poem will be produced as a letterpress broadside; the honorable mention poets will each receive a prior broadside from Littoral Press. Check back here in a few months for information on next year’s contest, and thank you again to all. And keep writing!
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Here are some comments from Stephen Kessler:
I think every poet should be forced to judge a competition like this because the experience teaches how almost arbitrary the results of contests are. All 30 poems selected by your readers had something going for them: interesting language, strong formal control, honest feeling, sensory vividness, or maybe just one really standout line. I managed to boil it down to nine finalists, and of these any one would be worthy of a broadside—they’re certainly more “publishable” than much of what I see in magazines—each a well-wrought poem with a voice of its own.
In selecting a winner I looked for sensitivity to sound and rhythm; images that showed me something unexpected or made me see something familiar in a fresh way; a sense of visual design on the page; and a conscious awareness of the texture of language, language grounded in the perceptual world. The subject or theme of the poem was less important to me than originality of vision and depth of perception. And I wanted to be moved—intellectually, emotionally, musically, esthetically—somehow, moved.
THE WINNER: “Feral Creature of the IRT.” I like the muscular physical urban lyricism of this poem, its simultaneous evocation of the dancer’s engagement in and with her body and her art, the immediate subway setting and the consciousness shuttling between the two. It has a taut, lean, sinewy musical movement that mirrors what it describes.
FERAL CREATURE OF THE IRT
Half-unzipped
bag on the train floor
opened to pink, like the inside of an ear.
Toe shoes. A spell from prehistory
murmured into her neck,
a vow sprung from under the top
of a music box. Her straight
back, hair drawn smooth,
she closes her eyes, rides
a fluorescent key ring
through her fingers,
the astronomy book opens
on her thighs, her cosmos
crammed into that sack:
sweat, rosin, tights. Stained ribbons
stitched to the instep, wrap the ankle,
cross once in front and tie
against the achilles.
She drives all will onto one toe;
boxed, wound in lamb’s wool
and Band-Aids, knots
her quadriceps and carves each step
into air, precise
as the press of teeth.
The rib-cage lifts above
the haunches. Her eyelids flicker, uneasy
across the pupil’s
black distances
and beyond;
the window, the tunnel, the track.
—Deborah S. Friedman
MUSÉE MECANIQUE
Flatly beating, transcendent error smokes in from votive
summer wharf-streets. The ocean’s reprieves underpin
desires of the many who gorge upon the icy few. Crushed claws
are in abundance, as are midriffs, fins, a beatboxer, a screaming
child. For love we put our small money into hulking creatures
that reward with godliness and plenty. Flatly bending, an attendant
draws a cover over the gears of the show. Between us and
consolations of the bay are the fishermen who will not observe
cautions or give passage to the greater ships. It is a holiday,
as the day is not quite holy in its mission, as it profits the city,
though no one can say how. The owner is a by-product of the rules
and antique wiring. The rules are hard to express, but the game
is first person : take the handles, and the floor under glass begins
oblique rotations. Hold a bit closer for fortune to offer her guess.
—Haines Eason
WATER CHILD
We give you no name as if
you were shame almost incarnate.
We call you by your fate instead,
by your dead-making process: miscarriage.
This is your sister who grieves,
who, flesh-burdened, kissed her love goodbye.
Her desire was a fellow child,
not this pair of liar-parents
who promised her shared flesh
and demolished her dreams instead.
We are Robert, Julianna, and Kim.
You are oleander, jasmine, and lilac
in the wind. Mizuko, you’d be called
in Japan. Water child. Not quite formed,
yet honored, grieved, and recognized.
We’ll know you, we believe, if we see you
born to others instead of us. We fathers,
we mothers you have never known
touch the place your absence fills,
wait for your face, your breath, your name.
—R.G. Evans
JOY ODES
I. Day
My eyes flutter, fill green with the green world
There is a natural urge to pray
to praise the green world for the day
laid open (cartographer’s dream)
for the day laid open among books.
II. Words
Let some
be called unto themselves
by verse. Let some
be called to their twin
the other. Let some
be the mystery
of your beauty there. Let
them embody
thoughts in air.
III. Sky
Skinned underbelly of clouds, moiré
ridged as sand where sea recedes
Shaved close this sky, these clouds
and bright: the inner walls of my heart
naked, full of light.
—Mary Fitzpatrick
AP PHOTO: TWO RWANDAN WOMEN REUNITED IN A CHURCH
IN KABIZA, 1997
All around you, the green
is still your green: tea plantations
in ruins, dead banana trees.
The soil red from its rusted self,
looking like powdered blood.
Your peasant hands splayed
and knotted, headcloth leaning
on headcloth, the better to bring
the embroidered blouses tight
to one another. Who knew
there was this much to lose?
That little wealth measured in water
gourds would leave such holes?
If your neighbor is not there to sing
while your menses drown you,
to bind your baby to her back
for today, the birds of carrion
might just as well be feeding
off the sorrow around your hips.
If her mortar and pestle do not grind
down the mist over the landscape,
you cannot cook or sew.
These two years apart have had
the length of all the bolts of cloth.
You don’t know a measure for this:
the dead covered in lime,
the voice gone away with the song birds,
the body that becomes its own graveyard.
On the brick floors of a church in Kabiza
you find each other right on the brink
of vanishing, and you cling on to the heart
of the day, your wailing dusted in hope.
This dance of reunion has just
the one step, and a long note hangs on air:
Friend, friend, friend.
—Lorraine Healy
THE POET TO HER POEM
Make of my elbows small pebbles
rolling the river bottom, a fierce and pummeling sweep.
If you will, build of my limbs and trunk
the supple breast and weight of the water.
Of my hands, eels, my ears
twin leeches sucking sound,
these feet are already two swift fish
flicking the shadowed pull of current.
Of eyes and mouth, shape glints and echoes,
sunlight and voices under the bridge.
If you can make of me water’s muscle,
then perhaps you can float:
lay your head where the shoulder of the river rounds,
where the heft of it bends and pools,
hear the river’s shifting joints, taste summer
licked from the lips of a swimmer.
Be sure to tell all the tales—laughter and the drownings—
what I have taken and what I leave behind:
whole lives, wide banks strewn with smooth stones,
the yellow foam of pollen painting the shore.
—Christina Hutchins
ARCHITECT
Uncap your felt pen. Pull just a bit
at your hair. Sketch swiftly
the hotel etched all night
behind your lids. Broad lines, five levels,
march of windows, long roof
with a tympanon kissed there
like a forehead birthmark.
Tear the onionskin from the spool. Begin
again, elevations popping
from the book of your mind.
Refine the windows this time.
Shift the entrance, enlarge it.
Quick strokes to nudge the balconies and
stop. Rip again. Now the roof
angled hard. As you peel the paper up,
think of air in the lobby,
stairwell shafts, closets—
and this building ripples
in the layers on your table,
small planet spilling from your head,
bedrooms tumbling from your inky hands.
—Amy MacLennan
THE CONSERVATION OF MATTER
I follow the hump of the whale exhaling
as it heads for the Bering Sea. I want to see it, and see it again,
closer. Or the trees, their wild, deliberate dance
in the arms of the wind. Even rain on a New York street,
cigarette butts in the gutter, taxis splattering. I can’t get enough of it.
You say: When we die we cease to exist. Everything else
is bullshit. But these mornings, across the table,
this hard-won companionship, surely something endures.
Slowly, light turns the bay slate blue.
Night departs. Morning reappears.
The dead look on from their accustomed places,
stopped in time, but not altogether silent,
the last whiff of the whale’s breath
absorbed back into ocean, air.
One life in this body, then absence, ashes—
the spirit lifted into a dance of branches.
—Meryl Natchez
DUSK AT DEATH VALLEY
A signal for the rock-hard rocks to bloom themselves away
in platinum in honey blonde
are moving past striation, removing to the snowcaps
fires dying up instead of down
A signal for the sophistry of salt its transmutation to mirage
A time to talk the is into the possible goodbye to the lines between all things
A time to love the world in grey where Whitman’s sleepers love the world
And the finally uncalibrated dead and the finished fields and the ruins love the world
where nothing will be likely very soon
A perfect example now my black dog disappears into the last of it.
—Heather Winterer