| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
| Third Place Winner, May 2008 | |
|
VIA! Allen M. Weber (Desert Moon Review) She likes to hike her dirty denim pants, to teeter on a trash receptacle— the daring daughter of a spectacle that people pass without a sideways glance. Behind an Appomattox five-day fast, Miss Via’s waking found her drunk and stark, balled up inside her three-wheeled grocery cart. She stretched and mumbled how she couldn’t last in cities of her selves. In store-front glass she strikes a pose of someone else’s life— an author or a famous bastard’s wife. If beetle-black reflections scurry past she’ll trap them with the dash-like Emily. And if she carries tomes about the town— because there’s no good way to set them down— the critic cites her incivility. Tonight beneath Graffiti Overpass, she flings tomatoes at her drying work daubed overhead. Ideas on a lark lean Via west like tributary grass before a petulant Atlantic: She may lumber through the lower altitudes, strip down the dress of urbane attitudes, and clamber above inhibiting scree. Out there she’ll learn to taste untroubled air, to make her water on unpublished leaves, to rub her narrow rump on trunks of trees, to go as Appalachian as a bear. Judge Patricia Smith’s comments: “’She stretched and mumbled how she couldn’t last / in cities of her selves’—lines such as that one fueled this marvelous character study. I was engaged so immediately that the creative adherence to form was a secondary, unexpected delight.” 
|
|
|
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition |
|
Explore Poetry
Must Reads
About.com Special Features
A Smarter Future
Tips that will help finance your education, excel in the classroom, and advance your career. More >
How to Ace the GRE
Being well prepared is the first step; here are more essential suggestions. More >
©2009 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company.
All rights reserved.