First Prize, $100, Barbara Daniels, Sicklerville, NJ (two poems)

Periwinkle

A clipped moon through
uncurtained windows.
My big book of cancer

lists 68 words for pain.
I light two candles.
Eat saltines to settle my stomach.

Start the required OxyContin.
Move a button from bowl to bowl
each time I drink eight ounces of water.

It’s a brave world, wan leaves
in the new snow on the hill.
An enormous sky.

I spend the day watching the light.
At dawn there’s a half hour of rose
through the ice at the roofline.

By five at night the green
of the pines deepens to black.
The snow and the sky turn

the same blue white.
What’s the blue my mother likes?
Periwinkle?

Named for the funneled flower.
That blue scatters into the night,
petalled shadows.

I tie a blue bandanna
over my bald head. Chill filters in.
I move the flowers my mother sent

so I can see them when I look up
from my heavy book. Each is still
perfect. Ice blue and tender.

("Periwinkle" first appeared in the Drexel Online Journal, a website located at <http://www.drexel.edu/doj/archives.html>.)

Pink

A girl who lost language in a fall
from a hay mow sees blue
in the light through a dark vase.
She sits on the floor writing
her name in rounded letters.

A spider web, no wider
than a thumb span, appears
and disappears in the changing light.
She reads the crayons: peach
is not peach but the sad beige

of a moth’s wing. True pink
intoxicates, rooms full of roses. Red
has the smell of Mother’s lipstick,
slipped from her drawer.
Is everything coming back to her?

She climbs into the bathtub,
runs the comforting water.
Reflected in the faucet, her face
curves upward, buoyant,
impossibly fat. Her legs,

doubled on the silver surface,
loop backwards, her feet huge,
her knees huge, herself
refulgent, pink as pig’s flesh
in the soapy water.

(first published in Pinyon Poetry)


Second Prize, $50, Rebecca Rank, Birmingham, MI

The Red, White and Blue
(After the Puerto Rican Day Parade June 11, 2000: New York City, Central Park)

An anonymous hand swings the camcorder across the mess and I think,
this must be how things look to a drunk after a celebration. Everything jiggling,
horizontal, tipped, then circling back, spinning, dizzying.

The camera’s eye grazes the Plaza and I imagine someone up there,
watching, as if he could lift the canopy of leaves and look, the way
a detective searches under a flowered spread with his flashlight.

My son rests on the couch and a western, late afternoon light streams
onto the glass coffee table. I notice the fine coating of dust
and an old Vanity Fair, some vagrant cat hairs. What’s going on? he asks,

sitting up and leaning forward as we stare at the T.V. I’d like to say,
a mudslide. Once I watched a reporter wade through the thick aftermath
of a California mudslide. The hand holding his microphone was raised

a little higher than the other and he observed, Out here they call this destruction
‘massive wasting.’ The refrigerator is humming while we watch
the pushing, shoving, the pulling, big hands, all those fingers—ripping clothes

from women. Over forty attacked: two sit on the cement, arms crossed
over bare chests; five men pull red slacks off one woman; three more tug
a white tank top off another; a man from Holland helps a woman

from France get into a blue ambulance—all she has on are sneakers
and her ankles look spindly, like a fawn’s. Someone tosses a wool army blanket
and she wears it draped over her shoulders, pulled together by one hand

head bowed, damp hair clinging to her cheek. We see the mindless ball
of men roll after, how still they reach into the van like one of those bad
dreams that won’t evaporate, that’s in your face all day. There’s the roller-blader

gesturing to a cop, the frantic movement of her mouth, the way he turns
his back. We see hundreds of Evian bottles littering wet grass, smashed
Dixie cups, crumpled food wrappers, partially eaten hot dog buns, sad used-up

crepe paper, crushed beer cans, unidentifiable rubbish, a confetti mix
of bystanders. We hear screams, the tiresome honk of a cab, the rise and pitch
of shouts, the bark of English, the polysyllabic music of Espanol, a thudding

boom box, the migraine slamming of a jack hammer, laughter.
People are buying variegated, pink tulips, selecting oranges
from storefront stands, just yards or blocks away; someone

in a conservatory is practicing the slow ache, the melancholic pull
of the bow across strings of a cello; crowds queue up to buy discount
theater tickets and hungry lines form at lunch counters. Why did they do that?

my son asks. I want to say something about natural disasters. Together we watch
indifferent faces of burnt-out cops, how they disperse everyone, the way a girl
lets go of a parade-balloon, then its long flight past the cold windows of grey skyscrapers.


Honorable Mention, Lynne Thompson, Los Angeles, CA

Complexion

What is so complex
about complexion?
I mean, we all have one so
it ain’t nothin’ so special;
just a bunch of cells
catchin’ God’s light a certain way.

But folks been usin’ pigmentary propaganda for years
to start wars, stop marriages, sell Nadinola.

Take black folks, for example,
or coloreds, Negroes, coons,
Afro-Americans, niggers, jungle bunnies
(descriptions change depending on who
you’re talkin’ to or who’s doing the talkin’).
For a bunch of folks who been divided, indicted,
derided, castigated, litigated, expurgated
but never exonerated, you’d think
we’d have better things to do
than equate comeliness with color
but we don’t.

We still insist “the blacker the berry”
high five “high yella”, forget
our forefathersmothers all swung from trees
every beautiful coloration disemboweled.

So let me remind you
‘bout some still good ‘60’s rhetoric.

If you are black as tar
you are beautiful
you are blackberries hidden
in a still forest freshened by rainwater
the darkest pearls picked
from the ocean’s harvest
you are a company of panthers
racing with the moon
across Zimbabwe
you are beautiful—
remember that.

If you are the brown that’s tan
you are beautiful
you are the promise
of Caribbean coconut shells,
creamed coffee and bread pudding
served in a New Orleans cafe, you are
and are at one with the earth
immutable
giving
you are beautiful—
and you must remember that.

If you are yellow like an afternoon sun at sea
you are beautiful
with the strength of desert cactus
after a thunderstorm
ablaze with the glow of gold
discovered first by Nubian kings
tart as lemon
rare sweet as saffron
smooth as butter
you are beautiful, remember?
Always remember.

If you are pale as ivory
stolen from elephant’s tusks
you are beautiful
and just as precious pure as milk
from the breasts of African queens
with the power of white-capped waves
off the coast of Somalia
& the brilliance of Bequia’s starry, starry nights.
Your are so beautiful—
trust and remember,
trust and remember.


Honorable Mention, Jeannette Barnes, Madison, AL

To the Garter Snake

Who slips his rough uncolored skin
among the warm rocks in a wall,

to 17-year cicadas, hulls
of brazen voices in the locust trees,
hollow, stiff

and delicate as skeletons of leaves, or
the flecked shell the wren conceals:

What you know will peel me too,
slick as a green

flute, jade and bone,
calling

through a screen of willows,
just this golden moon.


Honorable Mention, Kate Covintree, Troy, MI

Getting Ready for Bed

The stairs always smell
of green, the light
always dimmer than you
would expect when all the lights are on,

this light is always night.
And this night, the yellow glare
of the bedroom feels black,
feels broken, it smells of burning gardenia,

and buried roses that rest
one at a time, into the petals
of my eyes. I watch
my grandfather through the doorway, pulling down

the bedcovers, the white
bedspread, the flowered sheets.
I see two white pillows;
there were two before, but today, one was buried,

and the other is here.
This is when the death comes,
when the bed is halved
at midnight, and my grandfather sleeps alone.


Honorable Mention, Gwen Hart, Mankato, MA

Reaching

Each morning at the beach
people search the empty
stretches for treasure, reach

their hands in, pull peach
pits out and cans, empty
each one. Mourning the beach’s

lost promise, seagulls screech
for scraps of food, empty
stretch after stretch of treasure. Reach

and let go, says the tide, each
wave a wave of empti-
ness these mornings at the beach.

I learn to love the bleached
sand’s color, let my mind empty,
stretch. I let each want go, reach

up like a spinnaker to leach
light from the otherwise empty
sky. Each morning at the beach,
this open, outstretched reach.