Results are in for the 17th annual LITTORAL PRESS POETRY PRIZE! The winner is: Roger Greenwald, for his poem “Vacuum." He will receive 50 copies of a broadside of his poem, designed and printed at Littoral Press.  Honorable mentions go to Wally Swist for “This Morning,” Matthew Thorburn for “Fireflies,” and Pam Vap for “Love Song of the Tree.” These three poets receive earlier Littoral Press broadsides. Scroll down to read all four of these winning poems. Many thanks to all who entered for your fine writing and support. The quality of the submissions was impressive. I wish everyone could win .... 

This is the final year for the contest, and the first time I judged it myself. It’s been a fascinating ride. Deep thanks to all who entrusted their poems to our judges and readers over the years. In other news, Lawrence Tjernell and I are editing an anthology entitled Casting Aspersions (see below, after the poems). If any of your writing tends toward snark, we'd love to hear from you!

And now, the poems:

Vacuum

My father cut a vacuum tube in half.

I don’t know how he did it, never wondered

till now. Maybe you inject molten

plastic first, embed the whole in a mold

full of more, and when it’s cooled and hard,

saw the block with the lab’s finest tool.

This transparent square was always there

in my schoolboy drawer, souvenir

of a man I had no memory of, an object

lesson in science, craft, and art combined

that nonetheless seemed normal to me. I knew

he’d been brilliant, after all, even more so

than his father, my grandpa, who took from the vacuum

cleaner the household dust to grow its germs

so Public Health would know which pathogens

endangered New York. A grid of fine wires

meets the clear surface, behind them the silvered

glass curve of the sliced vessel. An echo

of electrons spins up from my hand.

There’s no one else this will mean anything to.

—Roger Greenwald

* * *

This Morning

— Sono Mama: "Just as it is”

The aromatic sweetness

of the thicket wild with 

fleabane and milkweed

opening into fragrance,

where two deer

must have strode

through those tall stems,

knocking some down,

creating new paths

from which

the redolence emanates

even in the slightest wind,

is nearly overwhelming;

the call of a cranky catbird 

wrenches its sound

all the way down

beyond the slope of the knoll,

where the grove of trees

stops before the sky and all

the passing clouds that are

 held in the pond’s mirror.

— Wally Swist

* * *

Fireflies

Yellow-green glimmers against the blue-black sky. One, then another, then another. In Hokusai’s woodblock, a lady’s servants have caught fireflies in a wooden cage. It’s dawn there, so no wonder she looks so tired, they’re so faint. In my mother’s long-ago childhood, the children trap them in a glass jar. Air holes punched in the tin lid but still, come morning, they’ve died. Is that why I stand here now, why I only want to look? I linger over their sudden ons and offs, the way they mean and keep meaning, these pinholes in the night. Seeing them, yesterday feels farther away; each scrap I swore I’d never forget slips deeper into the dark. The words, if there were words, then the melody of that song my mother hums as she catches them, the servant whistles as he latches the cage, I can hardlyhear. How easy after all to let go, to turn away now and watch as the fireflies flare up

here

nowhere

          now here.

—Matthew Thorburn

* * *

Love Song of the Spring Tree

Impossible, but not quite so,

to survive

this longest of cold times.

Gray laces of branches knock

against one another,

break in the foreground

of the icy, white sky.

It seems each frozen time they die,

seems each time they have truly died.

But a billionth time around again

a warm cloud’s release

soaks through the stillness.

The sun, too, from a far-off place arrives

kissing awake the ash, oak, maple and plum.

Now is the time to gather

strength from roots deep

in the home of the earth.

The wind’s breath song

insists on the dancing

of the unfurled

green. And the tree

embraces the world

in wide, sheltering arms,

whispering strong hope-words:

again, again,

come to this life,

again.

—Pam Vap

* * *