DREAMING IN COLOR

I will fill this legal size sheet with mutterings and chants
It will sound like a baby falcon crying from her nest,
flapping her wings
and falling to her death
I am choking on the sage I smell on your clothes and your sizeable ego
that I throw in my Florida deep-seated suitcase
We are highway rodents who huff the dust and vacuum lint off each other so lovingly
You kneel, your throat gasping; a wretched reptile with complications
while I bask in your coral afterglow
whirling snow drop tornadoes to animate your feet
I will break under pressure but never from confession of extreme heat
(It’s who I am)
Belt buckles and bra straps snap
and I’m left to wonder in still life,
Were you ever here?

Julie Mazza (TornScorpio16)

BEDFORDSHIRE

When I was a little boy
Short and sturdy
With bone straight baby-fine black hair
And what Grandpa Levine
Called black-cherry eyes
I knew there were cannibals in my closet.
The orange ones were bad.
The purple ones were worse.
But the bright green cannibals
Didn’t even cook you.
They ate you RAW.

The floor lamp with the coolie-hat shade
Was a definite cannibal spy.
When the sky was black
And the moon a cruel smile
The lamp would motion the cannibals
Into my bedroom on Westchester Road
And they would surround me.
Bones in their hair.
Tiny shrunken skulls around their necks,
Laughing and jeering and sneering at me.

Sometimes I would bravely escape,
Jump from the bed.
Run from the room.
I’d pad across the hall where
Val, our beautiful boxer, snored,
And stand,
A shivering, sweating little boy,
Open my parents’ bedroom door
And say,
“Mummy and Daddy! I love you!”
The moonlight would meagerly shine on
My father’s naked muscular arm
Entwined on my mother’s warm and curving shoulder.
They both would mumble:
“We love you too. Go back to sleep.”

And when I got back
To the plaid-papered walls
And white painted shelves
With all my books smiling at me
My lamp was a lamp,
And the crescent moon grinned
Instead of sneering
And I slept like a baby
At last.

Mitchell Geller (EDowson)

MORE ABOUT THE IBPC...

General information

Archive of winning poems

Most recent poems entered from About Poetry Forum

Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2003

Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2002

Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2001