First Place Winner, May 2006 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, May 2006

details under erasure
Ryan Laks
(The Versifier)

When first I noticed the ridges in my hands
abraded by my appetite for motion, I was reading a book
I won’t read again. There’s a surprise in all flesh
which makes me feel lonely, which brings to mind
it will be impossible to hold a conversation
with a psychic. There is not enough faith
she’d explain, when skin’s smooth as glass
when the glass alone seems less symbolic
than our belief that proximity’s never
the measure of mystery. She’d whisper not
to worry as the rivers
of my palm do. I awoke with a sense
of what The Gulf of Mexico
might taste like. The City of Salt.
When I am afraid of the pattern
of green fields and brown fields
it’s my way of imagining my hands
merely want to be loved.
To be loved without blemish
of some vestigial map. My life
line protects me from knives. Of
the possibility my body
that night as it arched
over a bridge might be
smeared across crag, rather the dare
of gravity. Sharp blades of
crabgrass. I woke to the hum
of my wife’s scripted breath.
Between the spaces usually bad things
happen. I think prayer is how hands mourn.
To veil the boredom of living my left hand lay
open. Open like an eyen not yet closed of the dead

Judge David Biespiel’s comments: “This one has a lively imaginative & inventive swirl, mixing insight with awareness, & it moves down the page with an energy that’s a cross between sacred and scared and scarred.”