| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
VIBRATO
Guy Kettelhack
(About Poetry Forum)
Shells of ears form on us very early in the womb: but when,
I wonder, do we start to hear? Five months into the trek
toward birth? If so, by January 1951 I’d first have heard his
baritone, and surely sucked it up like serum through my
infant otic bones. Involuntary, artless, serendipitously
sweet: my father’s voice poured from his throat as if it
couldn’t not. Its plummy rhythmic float acquainted me
in utero with all I’d later learn I’d really want to know.
I started violin at nine, pursuing it so I could find the secret in
my father’s tone: by twelve, through years of strangling the
fiddle-bone, I finally had the plum in hand. I’d something
else in hand as well: the practice of this fingered swell
and whap proved useful elsewhere -- in my lap. The thought
at first perplexed: vibrato had to do with sex. I had the suavest
tremolo on polished wood! -- I doubt my father knew why my cupped
hand had suddenly become so good. These Oedipal vibrations
marked our parting. I found new modes of music, more appropriate
for me. Four decades passed, then Alzheimers began to separate my
father from himself. When I returned and found he couldn’t think or
speak, I worried that his music might have similarly leaked away.
I sang: he brightened like an infant, sang right back. I heard the muffled
sweetness I’d first felt when I was little more than splitting cells. Its
ripple was the flow of blood between us. We harmonized because we
had no choice. He died, and now I find I almost have my father’s voice.
LEANING FARTHEST AWAY FROM THE SUN
Dave Ruslander
(Blueline Poetry Forum)
Somewhere near midnight,
blacktop reflected
like ribbon on a package.
Deer froze,
their silhouettes stared
from glittering gold diamonds.
Pontiac pointed at a green corn moon.
I hoped to travel beyond mystery,
past the horizon, into imagination.
Breeze no longer entered the open window.
When I threw out my cigarette,
the cherry end scattered
an orange comet into exhausted mist.
At the roadside, I stopped,
stepped from my car,
breathed in the night and realized,
there are shades of black.
RENTING PURGATORY
Mitchell Roth
(The Writer’s Block)
Between the storm window and the window pane
there is an empty space in which nothing occurs
anew.
This vacuity in the Realtor’s view--
“One wall
paneled in frost, a floor of fragmenting leaves, and
remnants...windswept in. An ample safe harbor
along the boundaries of paradise and demise.”
It is a shop window fogged over a vacancy.
A crow’s mirror a housefly has rented as a fence.
Eight thousand views of emptiness. Eight thousand views of
a single crow and a single smokestack.
Eight thousand ways to discover
nothing to eat. He will stiffen to an aesthetic.
WHEN SHE’S EIGHTEEN: A Pantoum
Eve Anthony Hanninen
(MinisterJoe)
My thumb traces the sumi rat,
its haunch an ink comma
round as an apricot half,
inhabiting strokes on a book cover.
Haunches, inky commas,
and I don’t sleep, while oracles
come to life from a book’s cover,
jump along my knuckle and a rafting hand.
I don’t sleep, seeking oracles
– index finger arrows to a random page –
await magic to jump the knuckles, raft my hand;
justifications plagiarized into omens.
My index arrows a page
and I don’t weep when the rodent leaps –
my justifications vault into omens
and up my sleeve tucks, gnaws my cuff, bears a litter.
I don’t weep when the rodent leaps,
because a man waits,
too, like a mouse up my sleeve, bearing his litter
of expectations: in another twelve years.
A man waits, too sure, says
When she’s eighteen, I’ll buy my trailer –
no expectations until I get there –
head west; leave my blinker on all the way.
When she’s eighteen, drive my trailer west,
where you’ll be waiting;
laugh to see my blinkers on
and wipers clicking counterpoint.
I’ll not be waiting.
Our summer illusion chafed,
rubbing counterpoint to his children’s needs:
Wednesday ice cream, football Friday, Barbie shoes.
This summer’s illusion chafed
as a too-small ring upon my finger.
He missed ice cream on Wednesday, football on Friday
and cried when he spoke of his youngest daughter.
There’s a silver ring on my finger
I sometimes swing on a pendulum,
try not to cry when I think of his daughter,
or consult any handy oracle.
My mood sometimes swings on a pendulum,
arcs round like halves of an apricot.
Downswing, I consult any handy oracle,
upswing, my thumb traces the rat.
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