| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
MOTHERS ARE FUNNY THAT WAYDETAILS
Laurie Byro
(The Melic Review Roundtable)
Before I make up the forest
I fill it with pheasant, with
a curious moth, apples and pecans,
and a wandering serpent
(who later becomes a troubadour)
I mop the forest floor, I hang curtains in trees,
I string cranberries and popcorn
in the limbs of the hemlocks above.
This is before the blight,
before thunder and lightning.
I pick your pockets, I brush out
your blond pony tail.
You take off everything but your argyles.
I hang your pocket watch off its long fob,
directly over our heads.
I kiss the pulse on your neck.
I want to say a word, a phrase, but we haven't
studied Socrates. I'm not even sure if we've
invented him, truthfully. We are consistent
with soft rain, with peacocks, and conch shells.
We scatter sea glass.
Of course there is a tortoise,
of course there is a hare.
But there are words you are afraid of,
in between sighs and cuckoos,
in between green mountains and hovering dragonflies.
All the lanterns we have strung, the grinning
monkeys, the silver slip of a moon.
You touch my lips with your finger
and tell me “no”
You thrust and sing.
The pocket watch swings
back and forth rhythmically
dropping minutes.
and his voice said five
Dennis Greene
(Poets.org)
1.
At five o'clock
he lay awake
and where he hadn't been
he was, and where
he thought he'd been
he hadn't:
and his voice said five.
At five-oh-five
he left his bed
and as the morning moved
from darkness into day
he brushed and cleaned
and shaved and cleared
the mess away:
and a voice said four.
At five to six
he wrote a note,
“I think it matters”
and having planned
for many years
for just this moment,
he rang the bell
and waited for the nurse:
And her voice said three
as the clock said six
and they went out and found
the rumoured north-west
passage and his voice said
two and his voice said one
and in the end cold desolation
and the corridors,
two open doors
and all the rest is dreams.
2.
Who would believe him any way--
the frame so tight that blood
comes through the pores
the drill a pressured presence
and the brain left open
to the air and no one there but him
can tell if they are getting anywhere,
don¹t put it there where I can see
that flicker of light, don't put it there
where half my body screws up tight
I am in pain, I am in fright
I lie awake and it is all a dream.
The rest is life.
Lori Williams
(The Critical Poet)
We wonder how it came to this,
smoking our cigarettes hard,
as if that inhale could shrivel the words
we know we'll say, as it does our lungs.
She hasn't seen her girl in three weeks,
thinks she fell in with a gang, drugs. I've had it.
I won't worry about her anymore she asserts,
hand shaking as she takes a drag. Detectives
have been to her home to look around, question.
She says they never asked if there was a father
in the house. Some things are a given. Most detectives
are men. Life is funny that way.
Our lips clasp the filtered ends like their mouths did
nipples once long ago, before we understood
what hopeless really meant. My boy called me a bitch
last night. Sometimes I hate him, truly, I tell her,
as I blow smoke rings toward a tall man's balding head.
The rings get larger, circling his neck, tightening,
until his tongue bulges purple and my ex-husband lies dead,
last words forgive me. Imagination is funny that way.
We talk tough, hands on hips, jaws set in a jut. Smoke hangs
in the air between us, like our lies. I see her wet, frantic
eyes through it, and I know she sees mine. We crush
butts under pumps and go back to work, breathing.
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
