| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING FOR ME
Sherry Saye
(The Melic Review RoundTable)
Nothing in your letter
about coming, about being on top
of a cloudless day. Nothing, even, about being
on a mountain side, not quite on top
and dreaming relevance, reasoning politics,
deals, maybe.
Dirt and moss
in my nostrils as you fuck me. Maybe
there. Control
and controlled.
I've always trusted you, take care of everything,
listen to me now.
Money, forehead love
as the button to the chest, music.
Where you're poised this minute
feeling chill or fever all around you,
perhaps my wonder could be
democracy and business, stimulated
by fields of nettles in the midst of cities, fame.
You are my big, famous city.
Elements of blood,
angry cars. Psyched, packed, and paid.
Judge Mark Yakich’s comment: “This poem has a gratuitous pair of ‘maybes’ -- I dislike the first one but I like the second one. Maybes should be used like exclamation points -- you only get a couple (maybe three) as a poet in your entire life. If you invent heteronyms, like Fernando Pessoa, you probably can get by with a few more. If you don’t know who Pessoa is, you’d better stop reading this and go look him up. (I prefer Richard Zenith’s translations over the others.) What I admire in this poem in particular are the following lines: ‘Money, forehead love / as the button to the chest, music.’ Notice how ‘money’ and ‘music’ make a pair of bookends. So do ‘forehead’ and ‘chest,’ and for that matter so do ‘love’ and ‘button.’ Making nice lines doesn’t always have to do with pairing, but it’s rarely going to hurt you if the pairs are 1) interesting (however one defines interesting, perhaps as ‘unexpected’; or 2) they stack up nicely. Here, I think they stack up nicely. And the line break after ‘love’ makes all the difference.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
3rd Place Winner, May 2003
