Third Place Winner, December 2004 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, December 2004

WINDOW
Michael Snyder
(Writer’s Block)

My mother called it the lens of hate
the day of the swastika

tacked across the two-car
garage door of the Beckers

vacationing away at Myrtle Beach.
She held me like a last breath,

squeezing my chest so tight
my heart couldn’t have been any bigger

than a freckle. As the banner
billowed like a spreading rash

she recited the story of the tall boy
with his basketball who disappeared

into the end of a day outside a different
window long ago, a time she fancied

herself well wearing gingham
and modest skirts. She’d put her hands

over her eyes, as she did mine now,
wondering aloud which stars

marked his birth, how
in the twilight his tennis shoes

glowed like twin moons,
what war he would draft into,

how the first color of every night
seemed a shade of bullet,

and about the steady orange metronome
beating up and down, up and down,

no shot in sight.

Judge David Hernandez’s comments: “Four couplets down, the narrator says: ‘my heart couldn’t have been any bigger than a freckle.’ But once you finish reading this poem, you’ll know that’s not the case. Imagine a heart big as the moon.”