First Place Winner, January 2009 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, January 2009

NEW NEIGHBORS *Eric Rhohenstein* (CriticalPoet.org) Yellow jackets ascend like mortar fire from the cherry’s split trunk. Spikes of fennel rise in the side yard, where the garden was before the old man died; his grandson somersaults through a choke of new clover. The day is dry; I should be cutting lawn. squirrel at the birdfeeder ground-skirt of grackles the village the village! fire alarm hum crescendo, and again Much like autumn wind: product of a gavel falling. (Soon enough, the cherry’s branches set against a winter skin of sky) Boy, do you hear the pop songs aging, aging from kitchen windows? (Across Erie, the edge of Canada erupting from spring lake-mist) Some things are broken before they’re ever bent, but only some. (One day, the summery inside of a woman) hay-rolls at the velvet edge of vision sunrise sunset and how it goes, and how it went. As if this was the start of anything; it’s only a lion’s mouth grown wider, wider, roaring. Much like your mother’s: the logic of donning play-clothes, of not missing dinner. farmers’ daughters fatten up we sons of nothing much the village cream is drawn cup by cup make whey! make whey! Afternoon dogs sing the pressure of dawn. Comments by judge Elena Karina Byrne: “‘New Neighbors’ ignites a fresh, sensory motion forward. At ‘the edge of vision’ the poem revitalizes literal vision alongside the figurative vision of the mind’s eye, ‘how it goes.’ Language in motion becomes a key process of seeing through an ever-changing domino-effect of metaphor: yellow jackets ascend, a grandson somersaults—crescendo, autumn wind, gavel falling and so on, until the poem reaches the marvelously mundane-sublime place where ‘dogs sing the pressure of dawn.’”