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| Honorable Mentions, February 2010 | |
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ARS POETICA #7 Tim Blighton (Desert Moon Review) The unraveling is slow: under red cellophane, black birds weave around themselves; punctuation strung together without words; the patterns dissolve into street lamps and bug zappers, stuttering and angry ghosts trapped in their own vaults. Dusk, a deep sealing breath, brings a bouquet of bubbles, stars and debris to the surface. Because, poetry is any quiet night translated by those who have only hammers and bells: every firefly strung through the dandelion seed like fallen Christmas lights; every sparrow dissolved into a bat, like a bicycler signaling; every cicada returning from the industry of mating to lay its labor inside thinly-cut wood: over and over, the batches will nestle in the ink of sleep, until years later—after each creator is consumed, perhaps, by a bird made flesh from the night—small tunnels will burst open, nymphs rise out, crawl into undergrowth whose roots they’ve fed upon for years, and molt into song. |
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O BE JOYFUL Judy Swann (The Waters) That July, rectangular, he crept backwards. He loved the mats of purslane on August earth, where he lay his face, and Nikka, the German Shepard, not mutual, and by December with tin ear, burbled to the gamelan. At three, suddenly verbal, he claimed to love me 92 olds and 47 pounds. I love you he said, 32 - 14 - 7 hours. He loved my eye and my other eye, loved his father’s lymphoma’s nodes, kissed them and said, Now we’re set. I taught him to say Je t’adore, which he pronounced “Such a Joe.” Don’t go, he told me, Such a Joe, Mother. |
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TRIOLET ON A LINE BY BILLY COLLINS Antonia Clark (The Waters) How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death. – from “The First Night” How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death. How wordlessly we tremble or embrace the thought of it, knowing we will give up breath, language, selfhood in the face of death. And, even then, I won’t pretend that faith will save us. This life is all we know of grace. How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death How wordlessly we tremble or embrace. 
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