Third Place Winner, March 2005 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, March 2005

WIDOWED
Ash Bowen
(The Writer’s Block)

I didn’t think of you today.
I carried a basket of apples
to the kitchen, peeled their skin
to the length of my arm.

The water boiled, and I dropped
the apples in, watched them detach
themselves from their cores.
The water turned as white as winter.
All across the orchard apples lie
like the roundness of beetles.
Each night the fox comes
for me. He waits at the gate-

folded road. He knows the light
sauce I’ll pour on my apples.
He knows the way he’ll eat
my apple heart.

Judge Alex Lemon’s comments: “There is a splendor at the center of ‘Widowed.’ Boiled down to its essence, all that remains on the page is the paradoxical exquisiteness of an enormous, yet vacant ‘heart.’”