First Place Winner, October 2008 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, October 2008

ACHE *Michael Creighton* (The Waters) The year I turn 15, my father leaves me with my just-widowed grandfather and my first full-time summer job. Each day in my lunch, I find fresh fruit and a sandwich so fat it stretches my jaw. Axe down, among rows of old pine, I learn to love the tang and bite of mustard on rye. After work, I stay out with friends, walking the town’s mile-long main street, drinking cold soda, looking for girls. If he’s awake when I return we discuss baseball, the difference between jack pine and white, or the pain in my shoulders and neck. He says, the Cubs haven’t won a pennant since your mother was three but there’s no harm in hope; jack pine grows fast, but gives poor wood—and as for that pain, son, there is no cure for an ache like that, save deep sleep and time. Just once I come home early— he is slumped in an old oak chair. As he sleeps, his shoulders shake. Dust hangs in sunlit air. Comments by judges Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald: “This was very close. It was almost a tie between first and second. We loved the rhythm of the poem, the story it told, and the conciseness of the writing. Its theme is both personal and universal.”


About the InterBoard Poetry Competition Archive of IBPC Winners 2nd Place Winner, October 2008