Third Place Winner, July 2008 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, July 2008

ROOTS *Ken Ashworth* (The Writer’s Block) When I was a kid, I never knew why one leg breaks the whole horse, or how a circle the size of my thumb pulls the whole ocean after it, but I learned all there was to know about girls behind Brindle’s barn when Alice Paxton broke my tooth out with her lunch box for trying to slide my hand up her whithers and cop a feel. I stood there in a moment of half disbelief slivering my tongue in and out of the slot that was now not-tooth, the taste of an old penny strong at the back of my throat, watched as she worried the hem of her dress, smoothing and re-smoothing that spot my hand got to. Her eyes began to well and she burst out in tears, terrified I might have swallowed it. We searched for it until dusk, scuffled clumps of hay with our feet exposing the soft underbelly of loam that was both not-earth and not-manure, until there was just enough light left to make our way down the fence line, fingers tipped together across the top wire, both of us knowing that soon, she would turn and disappear within a twist of green corn rows and I would watch until she became smaller than the stalks, then go on. That night I dreamed the tooth took root and grew into a tree like the one in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar which covered the whole earth, and I wove my way among its branches to the one which stopped just at her window, slipped inside sucking a wet handkerchief. Smell of dung still fresh in my shoe treads I slid in beside her holding my breath, sifting her hair with my fingers, trying hard not to wake her and to conceal the bulge in the maw of my jeans; the medicine bottle where I kept the tooth. Judge Tony Barnstone’s comments: “This is a good narrative poem, lovely in its bones. It has wonderful sounds (‘dusk, scuffled clumps,’ ‘tooth took root’), cool verbs (‘slivering my tongue in and out of the slot / that was now not-tooth’), and the poet knows that the good narrative poem moves, that the story turns rhetorically, lyrically, narratively, or better yet, all three, as this one does. The move into tooth-root-tree dream is what made me fall in love with the poem, along with the perfectly right strangeness of certain lines. I don’t know why when the protagonist climbs the world-tree into her window he’s sucking a wet handkerchief, but instinctively I love that he’s doing so.”


About the InterBoard Poetry Competition Archive of IBPC Winners Honorable Mentions, July 2008