Honorable Mentions, August 2007 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Honorable Mentions, August 2007

BARREN *Mitchell Geller* (About Poetry Forum) I built my own constricting carapace from chemicals ingested lavishly, and wished, with fervor, merely to be numb. Insensible, I watched myself become a grim, distorted pasquinade of me, devoid of kindness, sympathy and grace. Insomnia, anxiety and grief have made me recreant, bitter with fear. I know, my love, that you’d be horrified at my behavior since the day you died -- not, as you chaffed, in love within the year, but still marooned on this spiritless reef. Forgive, my love, the arid waste you’ve seen -- a year from now my garden will be green.


IMMEASURABLE *Dale McLain* (Wild Poetry Forum) In the year that caught me in its rusty snare, cornered me, rolled me like a bum, I grew an inch. Impossible, you might say. Middle-aged ladies do not grow taller, only wider, sadder, greyer. But it’s the truth. I felt every millimeter in my bones. The October sky was closer than it had ever been. From my new perspective I could see things that I’d forgotten. A footstep was a mile. Each heartbeat claimed an hour. So odd, that I was tighter bound than a spool of coarse thread, but felt as if my arms were feathered things unfurled against a coastal wind. In the year when I was laid open by a silvery blade, cut from scalp to toe, I was contained within folded petals a blossom, cotton white and ready for spring’s kiss. I bled with joy, a narrow river that went before me as a thin rouged trail I knew was mine. I learned to live unforgiven, came to own a sorrow as deep as a December night and a gladness that danced like stars upon the sea. Things begin so slyly, steal upon us like a summer twilight. I stand altered, a tower dedicated to the next breath drawn. Nothing fits me anymore.


SUPER NOVA *Brenda Nixon Cook* (Pen Shells) Axl Rose screams, I’m Going To Make You Bleed. Speakers forward, audio gain and bass on eleven. The car shakes. Her energy seeps violet from every pore. She knows there is no containment possible. Maximum overdrive. She longs for everything to stop. For the question that tumbles around in her noisy mind to take a needed rest. She longs for the benefit of sex, hot and hard or a good cry. Her soul wants to crawl from her body and leave. Bags bagged, a one way ticket to somewhere quiet. There are days the question that flies around her brain reminds her of a photograph of a tree in Greece. A tuning fork near the sea, two limbs barren from ocean spray. Growing vines cling to its split trunk, act as foliage and form the question that haunts her. That simple answer is but another question to tumble into nothingness. She hums along Welcome To the Jungle


FALL DAY IN THE PARK *Esther Greenleaf Murer* (Poets.org) In the lapidary light of the sea, I am a flatfish prostrate on the floor of a cathedral, the eyes on my back attuned to the coruscation of corals, polyps, bryozoa swaying in the current’s sunlit blue. Now on dancing eddies I levitate in celebration, vault and sweep and skew, pitch and bank and camber a hymn to overarching glory. Then I sink again, canting like a falling leaf, and rest in the mud, where one day soon my center eye will contemplate the bare ruined reef while the other, the wandering one, keeps watch for green ghosts hovering amid the welter of weeds.


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