| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
OF A JOURNAL PARTIALLY SMEARED FROM A SUMMER FLOOD
COMING TO TERMS WITH DELINQUENCY
VILLANELLE ON THE SKY
Yolanda Calderon-Horn
(Desert Moon Review)
August is too hot to be sexy outdoors.
Blue strip indicates a new period.
New art is forming.
I become a fossil on the spare bedroom carpet
shaped out of time I spent being petrified and eager,
but fire-trucking to the bowl makes it
impossible to stay stoned.
Because he’s baptized in my water,
there’ll be deliverance. He?
When did I conceive this notion?
He’s settled among my springy pillars
and has become my daily meditation.
I will look fastidiously after him. I hope he looks
a little like me to pull me out of grownup context.
I gobble and gobble chili-con-carne
as the legs of October rest high on a timetable.
He does not seem to mind my new weakness.
I have never been equally full and hungry
of/for an individual so little, so huge.
I barely sleep as I go from my right side,
back, and then left side.
He crashes comfortably: sleeps well.
His mutiny through my Nile absorbed
an entire day.
Upon delivery, a poem
that would jam in my belly soared
to epistles baby-bluing the neck
of that April sky.
The hurt he caused my yielding walls
with startled fists and feet
is now an obscure backdrop
like ink that blurs colorlessness
on the page it evangelizes to.
7lbs, 9ozs of sun.
Wendy Howe
(The Versifier)
I wish I could say the furnace
squatting in my yard
is a sculpture by Alexander Calder.
Scrap metal drum
with pipes and faucet prone
to spit water
could be his way of defining
the housewife whose breath
is steam-hissing through bones
and a radiator of shoulder blades
that stands nonchalant
letting a stray breeze
shrug off the dust.
That would make its presence
significant, a work of art
to contrast the silent poise
of stones and wide-sleeved pine
bending like a geisha to serve tea.
I can only say the furnace lingers
because a plumber honored
half his contract. He installed
a new system and neglected
to haul the old one from my garden.
When it rains
water floats on the rusted surface,
birds bathe in tequila
and I become their patron saint
wearing clogs and blue denim.
Mitchell Geller
(Desert Moon Review)
The sky has many faces, many hues,
from cobalt to a pale chalcedony;
a scintillant kaleidoscope of blues.
The opal dusk surrounds a maple whose
black branches etch a haggard tracery.
The sky has many faces, many hues.
Like sequins dotting indigo charmeuse,
the constellations contrast hauntingly
a scintillant kaleidoscope of blues.
When amber and vermilion tones suffuse
a sunset blazing incandescently,
the sky has many faces, many hues.
Amorphous, dark, the scudding storm clouds cruise
across a mass of lapis lazuli --
a scintillant kaleidoscope of blues.
The heavens’ lights, eternally the muse
inspire music, dance and poetry.
The sky has many faces, many hues --
a scintillant kaleidoscope of blues.
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
