Honorable Mentions, May 2009 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Honorable Mentions, May 2009

DAD NEVER READ NOVELS *Christopher T. George* (FreeWrights Peer Review) He was more of a Newsweek, Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite man, but before he died when ill he read steamy big gamehunter type novels, on the scent of rhino and cougar. Dad would rage about the plots just like he’d rage at the news and the folk who “climb on the taxpayer’s back.” I found a couple of saucy paperbacks hidden in his closet, checked the well-thumbed bits. He read my would-be novel, offered persnickety edits, always missed the big picture, complained that I was being mildly porno (tho’ it was more pun- ography). He had begun life as an English socialist, grousing about Harold Macmillan and people who “never had it so good.” Argued about America’s need for socialized medicine. But latterly he’d developed a passion for talk radio. I feel certain he’d long forgotten Labour. I have the notion that today he’d love Rush Limbaugh.


THE ABSENCE OF SPACES BETWEEN WORDS *Alexandre Nodopaka* (Pen Shells) Trying to sustain my carnal hunger from your single line response I wrung myrrh and frankincense from every letter of each word. And when those exhausted I darted my tongue on the punctuation and like a chameleon I snatched the single period ending your sentence. All that did was water my mouth inviting me to latch onto the spaces separating your words and while trying to reunite them by licking off the voids I constructed an uninterrupted phrase further enhanced by connecting with a twist the ending to its beginning thus forming a Mobius I entered skillfully its infinity.


HER OBITUARY PICTURE WILL LOOK NOTHING LIKE HER *Alex Stolis* (Wild Poetry Forum) the children will say it’s because she likes to talk about hearts, their shape and texture, how they are simple but never quite within reach. Her hands are unsettling, she is aware of her mouth, aware that everyone expects sadness and when the clock strikes the hour it brings with it the sound of a train, the feeling of dust and the sweet taste of his sweat. She was eighteen, refused to be contained, he knew how even a thin veneer of pride could shatter a man in two; being lost together didn’t feel out of place. Sometimes, when he was sound asleep she would watch him breathe, imagine they were on an ocean liner traveling to Europe, illicit lovers running away from long-established conventions, breaking their own rules because they could. There were gravel roads and cotton dresses, long-neck beers and no need for second chances and on clear summer days she swore she could see all the time in the world glisten in the corner of his eye.