First Place Winner, March 2009 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, March 2009

I, RAPTOR *Brenda Levy Tate* (Pen Shells) You feed me river rocks, oak bark logged with rain, a braid of fence wire (grandfather-bone-thin), its barbs worn to knots. For you, I swallow green bottle stems the sea has thrown up, blond baleen hair, antler points. My guts bracket your conglomerate: blood iron, hardwood ash, pith. Keratin dull as barn windows. Fish-scale mica. These are the last castings of desire, tossed at night like horns off some buckdevil. A pockled egg rises from stomach to throat. I wet it with your laugh, one final drink for you, then hack a hawk-man pellet. Pwckk! Its heavy oval sinks like a cone into pine needles. I fly light, easy. You make a rare bolus, my compacted love. What stranger’s hand will break you? Comments by judge Elena Karina Byrne: “This dense, strange persona poem, ‘I, Raptor,’ emerges within the language of nature and its almost ancient ‘pith,’ so that the words themselves are as physical as the things they name. This reminds me of the painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s hybrid nature-men representing the seasons or Hieronymus Bosch and the dark ‘conglomerate’ collection of dark images which penetrate the psyche. The final surprise line serves the poem well and startles us into a sudden present tense knowledge.”