Third Place Winner, May 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, May 2003

PETUNIA
Brendan Wiebe
(Enter the Muse)

Mother gave her liquor
once, and her pupils became

black sunflower seeds
bobbing in water bowls.

an empty bird
swing. mimicked laughter
from the bottom of
her cage at night.

Judge Mark Yakich’s comment: “This is a little lyric with a typo. One of my mentors used to say ‘trust your typos,’ which is one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten or given. For example, I almost typed ‘riven’ instead of ‘given’ in that last sentence. How much more interesting that would have been. To the point: I read the ‘swing. mimicked laughter’ line as ‘swing mimicked laughter’ -- that is, without the hard-stop. I'm not saying that the ‘m’ in mimicked should not be capitalized. I am saying it should be but also that I noticed the line itself: the idea that a swing could be said to mimic the pushed back-n-forthness of laughter. That makes for a decent sound-image conflation which one's mind at once does and doesn't want to accept as valid. To the real point: the most important thing about writing poems is not the nice image, the nice sounds, the nice moral or epiphany at the end -- the most important thing in writing poems is the line.”