Second Place Winner, August 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, August 2003

PHOTOGRAPH
Adam Joshua Liszkiewicz
(Enter the Muse)

Grass spills over patio stones, stained
metal chairs, a leaning table. The empty house

fills the fading frame with clean cuts.
The woman leads me with the leash of her grin.

I knock rust off the latch. The knife and I
ease in through the window, through the frame.

Gouged hardwood stains our soft feet, brown and red.
She wiggles toes, she kicks the tumbling dust,

draws shingles from the quiet fireplace.
Rust on the poker, rust on the hand, the ash

rouses scents that mingle and ascend.
The hanging chandelier above. Crystal

daggers. She reaches, turns one over and over.
Light cuts through the subject, joins and breaks.

The point burns my weighty palm, reddish-
brown and stained. Rust on the hand. The frame.

Judge Claire Hero’s comment: “The title and the opening couplet of this poem suggest a straightforward description, an imagist poem akin to the lyrics of W. C. Williams, and yet by stanza two the frame of the photograph is called into question; it wavers, and out of it comes the hint of narrative. It is only a suggestion -- a woman, a tension, an element of violence -- and yet these suggestions are enough to shake up the frame of the poem, to allow in more than discrete images, and to entice the reader into the world of the poem.”