First Place Winner, June 2006 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, June 2006

DISSECTING THE STROKE *AnnMarie Eldon* (The Writer’s Block) 1 The unsurrogateable sand. The running-through fingers without ripples but knuckles. The name Clothilde not invented yet nor naming by fancies. Everyone a genealogy reputation. Suillussing demons as common as medieval leeching or almost as feed. Fish, bread, prickly pear. 2 But carveable sunsets into desert desist or ghee-coloured gristscapes. Each dusk an anthroposcopic pruning of possibilities. Possible the gate after a door or at any rate a corner. The corner corroded by terse strips arguing cold then heat. This world where knocking commits and other meres politables. 3 A shesis. A bloody turn. These burden on accounts--how many to be fed, how many drank their fill, how many days already dead, one cloak, one hem, hundreds pressing. No easy sleeping at the end. All deeds surpassable within a dark olive grove. Why don't they wait and watch? 4 Neither is there a wolf dawn. Prairie to the north, Alaskan cold, scritch of bear, potassium tastes and fear tang and having predatory closing-in as killers would in a clime where killers dare. Killers. They wrote in the dirt saviour killers. 5 Rain came and paste in the palm those words. Unproud broke the antecedeneous deer dawn. Sudden jumped atop its ill-informed false cocked dark. Which parts and thus imparts none more labile than hessian morn. 6 Rain came. Bend. Keep this dried. Thus on the scarious creeping, keeping corner this is how separation hides, disguised and more disguised and signisifers in soil elements, tense enough to flame at colours’ scant filamentation. But skin. Rain came and rubbed. 7 Eonsed-over and saints to be made. But rubbing rain came. Bought the prickly pear up. Ran anyway. The baptismal pre-flood calm so small in the rubbed. Same water which rubybrown sinstain swayshes. 8 Only once and all the curdle torrent seeped. Barely perceptible. Love in a current. Innard screams scravle the peace But not before diamond micro-whorl and fingerprints of bloods stroped a tiny tear hope. Judge David Biespiel’s comments: “I like the mixture of diction, high & low, ornate & clammy. And I like the echoes of Wallace Stevens, too, in its general coolness especially & its insight.”


About the InterBoard Poetry Competition Archive of IBPC Winners 2nd Place Winner, June 2006