| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
FLIGHT
Sarah Sloat
(Desert Moon Review)
The airport wants my shoes.
At last I see the trapdoor in the soles
toggling down the x-ray ramp.
My shapes have never shone like this.
My whole life lights up in vials and doses.
When I fly, I fly entire and abandoning.
The animal lies down with the mineral
a leather belt curls around my mints and keys.
At the threshhold, a man draws his detector
down my spine, that hinge, the leash
that grounds me.
His convex glass magnifies my need, though
he gets too close to see the blue fuse inside.
He'll never leave the earth, never
see the seams of an overloaded suitcase
rip with wishes, rent as a lost continent.
Judge Ravi Shankar’s comments: “This postmodern paean to a post-9/11 world where each transient (some more than others) is subject to a battery of new requirements and search, and while such a subject has an inherent gravity, the speaker avoids lapsing into sophistry and sentimentality by applying levity to the reflections. The piece begins with an acquisitive personification: ‘the airport wants my shoes.’ That metonymic call-to-hunger sets the stage for an eerie world where a life can light up in ‘vials and doses’ and where the luggage inspector is both kinky and earth-bound, irradiating the secret desires of the bodies that pass his gaze with an electronic wand. The reference to the ‘blue fuse’ immediately calls to mind Dylan Thomas’ ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,’ with the caveat that a blue fuse while still full of vital, sexualized energy is more desolate, like the fading photograph of a bygone era.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
3rd Place Winner, December 2005
