Second Place Winner, September 2004 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, September 2004

STUDY ON ASHBERY
Kemel Zaldivar
(Melic Review Roundtable)

All is just warming up; the whole thing
won’t be like this: already someone has flipped our snowglobe on its head,

and the little white flakes swim angrily beneath the statue’s face. It is right, I suppose, that we airbrush a Colgate smile on the dilemma, no matter how yellow

it becomes: for it’s clear, unstated
but clear, that things will fulfill
somehow--the future wears a garland.

But though we know this even beyond knowing’s equipoise, we insist on reiterating it each time there is some kind of silence in the heavens, when only the wind ravages

the medlars. After all, it’s not so bad:
a little painful, but definitely worth
the little sweat that falls.

Last year’s rutabagas are yesterday’s tomatoes, which in turn will be next year’s rubies.
We can study every stage of the project, and give each back a solid pat.

Remember when Dawn with ineluctable song carried us like a mom totes her young?
Or when the sky’s wrath was so pervasive

it could not even be looked away from?
These, as all meanderings over petals,
mean nothing, do nothing but warm us
on cold nights, when the fire within goes dark.

Judge Anthony Robinson’s comments: “Though delightfully filled with things (snowglobe, rutabagas) that also manage to be ideas (garlanded future), I feel that this poem ‘is just warming up[.]’ Would that this poet stretched his or her reach a bit further; would that this poet forgo the name-dropping of a contemporary master and strike out on his or her own. There’s talent here, searching for the right container.”