| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
PROMISE OF AUGUST'S RENEWAL THE THIRD NAIL
Maryann Hazen Stearns
(Wild Poetry Forum)
A brief glimpse of her in the market
the flash of recognition on her face
and the time finally came when I remembered
She deliberately turned away as if
I would hasten to strike up a crisp conversation
the tart apple of her eye her lips puckered tightly
on an ancient misunderstanding of the worst sort
her four-year-old son in my inexperienced care
that quiet summer day that after-nap changing
the warm drone of bees and katydids sifting
through the screen the fresh green ivy pattern
of white lazy quilt in the upstairs bedroom
cleaning gently his small boyness the tissue bits
that clung persistently to his meek damp skin
the ineffective powder lumps my exasperation
my tsking tongue the sigh of a whimper as I looked up
the tiny forehead creased below a wisp of blonde wavelet
my heart as it wrenched to stone
the terribly soft young voice whispering
the obviously rehearsed dialogue to say in such a situation
please don't touch my private place
my hand jerking back my lips which muttered incessantly
oh sweetie I'm sorry so sorry sorry hands shaking uncontrollably
as I tried to replace a clean diaper regardless
of tissue bits, piss or private parts the heart pounding blur
of that horrid afternoon until five o'clock pick-up and finally
the phone call next morning her curt voice which informed me
she'd no longer be needing my services the instantly dead
phone cradled in my limp hand before I'd had a chance
to explain the unexplainable
that no good parent would believe
the undeserved shame I felt
the anger at feeling defenseless
and then out of the blue they moved away
and time went on and on the memories and mysteries
the moment-to-moment minute-by-minute years until
her face turned away in the market today
and the face of a young blonde man at her side
turned and held my eye like a warm ripe peach
in a hot August orchard and smiled
OF WATER AND FISH
Marie Eyre
(The Critical Poet)
My mother presses me,
from behind the closed bathroom door,
to fetch my father, somewhere in the yard.
She is pregnant and sick and water
spilled, from her, in the living room.
I am eleven; I am afraid;
I don't understand the water.
She's away for days in the hospital.
My father stays with her, and grandma
watches over my brothers and me.
I expect my mother will be back
soon. One afternoon, I come home
from school, and my father is crying;
my grandmother is crying, tomato
soup steams from bowls on the table.
We must eat and go back to school.
Grandma says, “don't tell them yet,”
but my father tells us anyway. We sit
numb at our lunch; I hear my father
tell grandma that the baby died too --
that it looked like a fish;
I don't understand the fish.
And I hurt terrible, in a place
that is not made out of my body,
but I do what I'm told
and eat my soup.
OLETTA
Tammy Peaden
(Melic Review Roundtable)
She is always Oletta,
ejected misconception
of a white trash traveling man,
trading bibles and bastards
at another highway diner
some thirty-odd ago and
now she works the same table
where mama bought
a good book and a good time;
serving eggs, pouring joe
for the good ol' boys who snigger
behind stained cups,
they snicker hey bright nigger;
high-yeller piece
with a white gal's face.
Their eyes finger her wet-suede skin,
curl themselves in umber coils
springing from her head;
her shoulders itch
as they watch the rounds
but she is still Oletta,
goes home nights,
room 12 at Queen's motel;
she signs the slips in pencil,
pays rent by the week because
things change, don't they;
maybe she'll pack it up,
move to London or Paris
where skin like wet suede
buys you benedict and latte
served on silver trays,
houseboys in black-tie
draw baths laced with Vouvray
and now the tub is full;
good ol' thoughts float,
shed layers below her breasts.
She thinks of traveling men,
sees faces without features
beneath her lids and wonders
where the names went; what happened
to the traces left behind?
She listens to a TV preacher
saving souls through the walls,
glory halleleujah, the refills
aren't really free. Time leaves
footprints in rings, dead trails
growing cold with the water
and she remembers
she is always Oletta.
Joyce Davis
(Writer's Block)
The children of survivors give themselves over
to righteous meddling, clear the rubble
and rehearse their creation myth:
how two timbers fell as a burning cross
and glowed until the sacristan found them
before collapsing into charcoal,
how a congregant salvaged three medieval nails
from the ruin, and wove their melted writhings
one around the other around the other
to form a second cross, a symbol, the Bishop said,
of the healing the new cathedral would dispense.
Only you invited the dead to the party
and forced the living to listen. Hot and cramped
(but not as cramped as they might have been)
the powerful sat through hours of argument
that would later cast a pall over the roast beef.
You'd be damned if you'd let them get to a point
without hearing from the unlucky witnesses:
the untouchable boys, the soldiers, the dispossessed
who wander your diminished no-man's-land.
One grows into the other, and every chord
is a trinity whose members crucify
the listener with tritone blows. The call and response
from plane to plane to plane
consecrates this space with tongues.
The key you hung from a tenor's sigh
opens your hope that the separate penitents
might earn forgiveness through execution.
The new nave is built of blood and air,
buttressed by the tension of these voices
straining to build new unity from the shards
of ritual, reaching across the trench that divides
the unthinkable from the unspoken.
Conflict is what we have, and out of it
you wove an envelope that wraps the broken
pieces in a fragile skin of peace.
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?
That one of our number built out of breath
a tabernacle that destroys and raises itself
again and again and again
to keep what is holy suspended before us.
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