| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
GRANDFATHERSPILL
Mitchell Metz
(The Writer's Block)
on Goya's El Quitasol
As a young man I learned to render
a reasonable facsimile of emotional landscape.
Over it I conducted my life.
Such were the demands of love
that I stroked pigment with mannered gesture
onto prepared canvas. Passion
became a study in shape and form, light and dark;
principle an iteration of found triangles
coyly contrived to invite audience
and consistent with the needs
of some artist holed up inside me
drinking tea. Then one sunny day
I spilled Emma onto the world
and that fragile, twiggy, half-
accidental thing
cried out in organic counterpoint
to the elaborate folds of smug.
She burped landscape up from flat
to fine focus, seized
my composition as her own
and informed it
beyond my practiced art.
Caitlin Palo
(About Poetry Forum)
I could see in the depths of her eyes
Thoughts too dark for words.
Images of other eyes, glazed over, encrusted with dirt
Causing her to tremble on the verge
Between understanding tears, and confused questions.
Wondering if the prison sealed with rain and small roots
Is really a prison at all,
Or if it is only a place where the man inside
Is no more a prisoner
Than the laughing white daisies are jailors.
She walks beside me,
Wide-eyed and silent.
Until we reach the sea
And I explain to her with my hands
That, like the sea birds with wings of air,
The light in her grandfather's eyes
Has flown towards the sun,
And their blue is now part of the sky.
EARLY HOURS OF SKY
T.E. Ballard
(MiPo Zine & Board)
Last night,
while you were sleeping,
stars hung like small children
on their father's coat. I flew,
my collarbone pressed to glass,
a window bigger than my frame
and I believed for the first time,
allowed myself to let go.
Angels came,
ones who did not know my name
and there was no fear,
no need to pretend. Naked
on the 27th floor of some hotel,
I entered this world again.
Small and white,
silent without waking a lover
or demons who fall from me
like stone. I entered the world
with a single breath
and I remembered god,
eight days of wonder, creation.
I remembered
that before he began, god
cupped his hands together,
this old man who had never lived
called out-- I am, I am
and he was.
Last night, I did not wake you,
even though I knew
you'd understand--
an upside down sky, silver towers
of trees. I did not wake
but flew to you instead.
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