Second Place Winner, September 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, September 2003

FIVE DATES
Trevor O’Brien
(Enter the Muse)

I. Carrie; Restaurant; Early Morning

She could not see my eyes for the duration of the song

There is no candle burning brighter
than my emergency torch. The infant
new day is trapped in the old window

II. Myself; Patterson Park; Evening

Canal. A trout squirms through a paper
Chain-link fence, and into my mouth.

Reflection pools together in the water.

No way in, or out, unless
I decide to shred my skin.

III. Entonio; Night Club; Late Evening

Stagnant. Straight. The touch of discolored
fingers, coarse like filters. The pumping is not
blood. Away with your needs, I’m down to my last two eyes.

IV. Mother; Snow Bank; Midnight

We make our vows in the snow.

Plant some flowers pull

Some flower from the road

In yellow-stained mourning, there is no son rising

White. Twenty selfhelp-changers,

Plugging my mouth. Blurring

My iris out.

V. Death; Bedroom; Mid Day

The voice screams a trembling light
onto the eggshell bed. All becomes yellow.
By tomorrow, death be better bedfellow.

Judge Claire Hero’s comment: “This poem alters the rules of the narrative poem and the traditional biography. The title of the poem and the titles of the sections lead us to expect details of dates that are ‘realistic,’ yet what we are given are details that could only exist in the mind. We are invited into a disjunctive narrative, one built of fragments, aiding or overseeing the speaker’s ‘memories’ and using them to reconstruct a narrative of the life of the mind.”