Honorable Mentions, July 2007 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Honorable Mentions, July 2007

INSATIABLE *Laurel K. Dodge* (MiPo) The mackerel are as charred and flat as the tomatoes are red and round. There is magic in random numbers, a message in the three dead fish and the five fruit, ripe and grotesque. A trinity of skeletons, and an uneven yield, a harvest that keeps everything off balance. The green tomato waiting on the sill will not make a whole. Even if you put a hand clear through, you would not believe you’d seen the holy ghost. Fork and knife suspended above the heaping plateful of food; your belly growls, but you cannot move. Later, you’ll remember how the eyes stared at you like god. How, in the distance, the apocalypse burned. This is how Lot’s wife felt just before she turned around. Soles too blistered, too tired to move the body forward. And a hunger despite the plenty; an empty stomach, a bereft vessel. A hole that could not be filled.


CHERRY GROVE *Elodie Ackerman* (The Writer’s Circle) All around the old place, the dead visit. The day he opened up the trunk of that sweetgum tree, and before we saw the horseshoe hanging inside, something brushed against my face. I heard a nickering far away, and the smell of oiled leather and candlewax. A few days later Lloyd found an anvil half inside an oak tree, back by the old barn. It was ten feet off the ground, and the color of storm clouds when the air smells like metal and electricity breaks it right in two. They say a shipwright lived there once. I know. I’ve heard him hammering. That was before the rumor of the slave revolt across the road. Nineteen men killed, tortured, all for the sake of a child’s tale. A child named Obey. No excuses. The crape myrtle we cleared from the back forty bled claret- colored sap, and stuck inside one old, stubborn knot was a skeleton key. The silver lying all around, tarnished forks and bone- china plates. Daddy said she burned that house a’purpose, took the tram to the train and left town. Nobody Ever saw her again. But to be frank, I don’t believe it. I saw her walking in the fog one morning, early. Picking bones, rearranging bricks, breaking twigs over and over. She saw me too. We’ve been talking back and forth, she and I, between the branches.


HAUL *Brandon* (The Maelstrom) The last brown box and bulging plastic bag’s been thrown inside the truck. A vacuum screams through empty rooms while morning dawns and drags. The past is bundled up, we’ll follow dreams of wealth and newness in another town, a neighborhood with winding streets, shade trees and parks. Escape’s the road we’re driving down, scrambling to find those blasted keys and turn the locks. Before the front door shuts for good, a glance around the house reveals familiar ways and that our lives had ruts: the dingy pathways on the carpet show high-traffic routes, that we just spin our wheels, because we’re there no matter where we go.


SPARROW *Bernard Henrie* (Writer’s Block) 6:30. The radio just lighting up. November in corridors, faint yellow bulbs turning on. Men take down their trousers, lazy at last; butter placed on the table, fresh meat cut on heavy bread, almost eaten. Utensils burnt underneath with electric heat, men beside dishes in the sink, women released from shops asleep on davenports, a soiled potato in a pail; once vivid folds of hair pinned back. There are men who look out between the blinds and darken as the light falls dark, grow still in rooms that grow quieter still. Not morning time, not afternoon, time written down but not addressed, thin painted palm trees on fields of long faded green, a souvenir cup holding a tooth brush, a cloth your scent; lumps of hydrogen stars, clouds of meteor gas and fumes of futile ascent. I have held a mask across my face, stayed alone longer than I should want, become fossil bone and broken shell. Almost partners with the migratory birds fallen on thermal air and comic suspense.


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