Issue 3 Archives
Contest Winners and Finalists

Allison Joseph
What Poetry Is
First Place

Is it that last piece of chocolate
you swore you would not eat,
sweet morsel left in the candy box
to devil you after you sucked down all
the others, left this sorry orphan among
tousled wrappers? Or is poetry the candy
box itself, brimming with little secrets
of cream, bits of coconut, nougat—
silver-wrapped divas so tempting
you must undress them? Or is poetry
the lover who gives you the box,
man who claims to love you, but who
hurt you so badly he had to buy you
this gaudy package, gargantuan full-pound
of vulgar calories you might as well apply
straight to your hips, hips this lover
has been hesitant to stroke, knowing
you’re so mad at him one touch may
leave him without a hand? Poetry might be
those hips all the glossy-covered magazines
want you to diet away, making you smooth,
flawless, utterly useless. But poetry is the flaw
that makes your hips want the candy,
that makes your lover think he can soothe you
with a store-bought box he didn’t even wrap,
the anger makes you throw away everything else
he’s ever given you, tossing each ring and necklace
and corset out of the window to land in the street,
ready to be picked clean by anyone stumbling by.


Maureen Tolman Flannery
Where Time Faultered
Second Place

Outside Mantua, Italy, archeologists unearthed
a pair of human skeletons from the Neolithic period
locked in embrace.
Of course they were lovers.
It was land that would come to be Italy.
Complicit sun peered through poplars and warmed
suggestive paths among not-yet-domesticated olive trees.
They had raced away from their day’s tasks—
his hunting the four-point stag,
hers gathering the plumpest blackberries.
Needing no fermented juice to feel intoxicated,
she maneuvered through barbed rose vines
which future millennia would coax into bearing grapes
and met him there, in a grove of trees,
bird busy and humming with summer air.
They whispered and sang in imitation
of the nightingale that discovered their love
and announced it to observant clouds.
Late into the morning, lying entwined,
they ate scrub kumquats off each other’s tongues.
He combed her long dark locks with parted fingers
as his lips followed the golden trough
from her shoulder blades to where he licked salt
at the two shallow pools between her hips.
She waded waist-deep into his eyes and retreated
to the beach of sky so she could breathe again.
Time, confounded by arrangement of their limbs,
could find neither its bearings nor its stride.
As desire wound a wild vine around their adoration,
bound them to that indentation in the grass,
Time, unable to pass by, drowsed, yawned
and settled in beside them
for a brief, five-thousand-year sleep.


Carissa DiGiovanni
At the Caliente Tropics Resort
Third Place

in the whirlpool, the Canadian
man who’s hitting on Robyn
tells us he sells high-end
meats at a very high-end mall,
tells us Elvis used to come
here in its heyday, and the Rat Pack too.
He’s telling us, us girls,
and his nephew whose name
he can’t tell us. We are all—
the four of us, and the hot tub—
under a big, tiki-lit
Easter Island mask of shitty
fake wood, and I forgot
my bathing suit so I
have to sit on the edge of the scratchy
white tub, with my skirt rutched up
and just my legs in the pool.
(I push Robyn’s back with my toes
in time to his crassest
comments.) But, up here
I’ve got a better view
than everyone and as I
stare past the plastic yellow
slats of the lounge chairs, and see the snow
slope against sand-covered
mountains, while pine trees stretch
in needled worship underneath,
back to the meat dude I think I can see
the six-point flash of Sammy
Davis’ necklace as he jumps
off the pink diving board in the big
pool. And maybe the ruin of blue
suede shoes, floating where Elvis
flung them in its shallow end.
So there could’ve been a heyday.


Dion N. Farquhar
What Not to Write About
Finalist

I.
relishing every Palm-Piloted
minute of whirling dervish speed-up,
apoplexy over optimism,
the horror of global bloodbath,
inheriting damaged parents,
the centrality of the clitoris,
unacknowledged privilege,
flakes, slackers, and whiners,
how truly fucked everyone is.
II.
Bernadette’s brother who OD’d on heroin,
Marty’s brother who’s homeless,
Debbie’s sister’s resentment,
Steven and Susan’s two
decades of alienation, Tom’s brother,
Bob, who shot himself and missed.


Willa Granger
The Voice Box
Finalist

I’ve been learning how
With age,
The voice box
(Membrane pish posh,
Cartilage riff raff)
Will cave,
Eventually.
I chose science
To say
That the owls have favored tonight
And that means nothing.
To say
That my brother’s stutter
Was merely his mind
Setting,
Resetting,
And my retracted-sound mantra
Was an offering.
A woman told me
That her medication
Made her thirsty
And I could hear
Her vocal folds shudder,
Wind burned after 80
Some years.
Save books,
Save hours,
I’d no answer.
2007


Sandra Soli
Gathering Ingredients
Finalist

This bowl from the back of the cupboard
a tradition, yellow and scarred
but the right size. Every year
I expect to break it.

Mandarin oranges and pineapple bits
from cans, drained sunspots
heaped in a colander. What else?
Banana coins, sprinkled with lemon
and a soft froth of cream
so that our mouths may speak only
only kindness.

And this year something new:
star fruit, an oddly-shaped
cosmic good luck charm
benign in my hand,
sunset-skinned,
seeking mutability.

What does it look like, growing?
Is it finished? Does it know?

How do I slice astronomy
so easily, atoms spinning
into the family salad?

They might explode
at any moment, infanta-stars
to fill a sky or a table
with hope, points of light
that could last long enough.


Gerald R. Wheeler
Sika Landscape II
Finalist

A rusty pickup packed with crates
washed up by storm,
backfires loud as a cannon,
spooks Clydesdales pulling empty carriage
heavy as loneliness.
Their massive feathered hoofs
stomping cobbled stone, noble bodies rearing,
raised heads shaking wildly, jangling
silver bells on braided manes.
The young raven-haired woman driver,
dark eyes welling tears,
tightens grip of reins with callous hands
as leather harnesses embrace arched necks
and bluff shoulders.
Nearby, a crossing guard carrying a STOP sign
in the middle of street, gazes at sky pouring liquid sun
on pedestrians racing to last bargain and disillusionment.
He returns to his station under a lamp post sprouting flowers.
Down the road, a spruce forest with wire cages
filled with wounded eagles, hawks and owls
shot by poachers. Casualties rescued by
the Sika Raptor Refuge Center.
Below the sanctuary,
a battalion of headstones
of America’s fallen
not saved
stand in formation
saluting stars.