“Art in the Air” Poetry Contest
Winners -- July 2003
Theme: Family
First Prize—$100
Ron Howland (2 poems), Reading, MA
Intersection of Gravity and Light
It is like a morning after wholly
making love. It is like the singular
sound of a pulley in a marina,
the silence of the sky pinging against
a metal mast. It is a winter noon,
the keen skewed horizons of white buildings,
the sun like a pale blue water tower,
domed and seamless and as bright as slipped wire.
You could hold all of the lives that you love
in your hands on a day like this and rub
them like oiled stones, like pieces of beach glass
from opposite seasons. You could toss them
above you; watch them hitch in the air.
**
Stopping at Night in the Milky Way
We have arrived at the edge of the light
after a long ride. The children bladder
dance while the sun sets on the flat rim
of New York State—the air cool, the road still
warm with sun. Our thoughts are painted porches,
the first stars like lights in distant kitchens.
We are pleasantly lost. We will buy taffy
manufactured in the state we have left
and spend the night in a strange place.
We will sleep on sheets that float
a strange familiar smell, waiting first
for the boys to sleep, the motion of the drive
humming in their limbs, the pulse that passes
through us lifting in their throats like sky
going on quietly forever, whole
and opening beyond us. Scarcely lost,
we are light travelers, strangers
stopping here at the bottom of the sky.
We will sleep again, we will forget
ourselves again and something will wake us.
Second Prize, $50
Sophia Rivkin, Southfield, MI
The Valise
Mother, father, I hold you in your valise,
invent you as you invented me.
The Europe you escaped is an old man
with gnarled fingers, a thumb
splayed as a paddle.
He is tied to a village,
drags a cow, my mother’s wooden hut,
the grandmother cooking mash
in a black pot. His mouth is a black pot—
he is swallowing Russians, Germans,
eating Jews—my mother is hiding
from him in a haystack.
Over her head a sky of smoke,
a city of blood.
The valise will not close—
the moon falls and shreds
into the black hole of history,
broken, gap-mouthed—
knowledge a little crumb
caught in the seam.
I would speak to you,
mother, father,
asleep in gloom and silence.
I would comb your hair,
open the window, let in light.
But I walk the corridors
of this railroad station,
huge room, vaulted ceiling,
echoes from stone walls.
The valise is grown to my fingers,
it holds my name.
I cannot put it down.
Honorable Mention: Karen D. Harryman, Burbank, CA
Fishing with My Mother
I.
October lake water holds our stories
and catfish big as cars. Today
the neighbor’s recent death
like pollen on the swollen surface
will not sink. The soft salesman
turned angler drifts with us all day,
our boat leaning on one pontoon.
II.
Mother knows to twist the hook
ten times before she loops and tugs
the slack with her teeth. We drift
and cast and reel and lose our line
and bend our hooks. When we speak
our words ride the water like Jesus bugs.
III.
In the wet dark
I’ve learned the difference
between limestone and old Chevies.
I swim through the windows
over the hoods. It’s a ghost lot
down here, Mother. I am under, deep.
I am a dark fish darting
in and out of the sunken wrecks
settled amongst deer carcasses
long washed clean, their bones grown green.
I have made an underwater room
with bean bags and lava lamps,
my first prom dress, and secrets
our baited lines just bump and skim across.
Honorable Mention: Suellen Wedmore, Rockport, MA
Child Waiting
It’s a new kind of reality:
a child waiting in the dark
liquid, in her own long movements,
to be born into the unison
of sunlight and air. Life
exploding within life,
an egg penetrated
by a fish-tailed grab bag,
encoding my husband’s cheekbones,
my own sharp knees. This
will be all our futures howling
in the hospital’s fluorescent gleam,
with brown eyes, I imagine,
in deference to a history
not my own, the drum beat
of another continent—a moment
of desire generations ago,
beneath a rippling eucalyptus. Soon
an infant will curl in the hollow
of my arms, smelling of dried milk
and tomorrow. The chords
of yesterday, of a world
I will someday
not be part of, singing.
Honorable Mention: Timothy Russell, Toronto, OH
In Novus Ordo
The Mulkeys all have yo-yos
today, and they are casting
tiny planets here and there,
creating another universe,
ignoring the gray drizzle.
By this time next week
another gang of hoodlums
will again be gouging the shiniest cars
in the neighborhood
while the Baltimore oriole
fidgeting among the wet blossoms
in somebody’s backyard cherry
ignores them. Maybe it will be
the 15th consecutive day of rain.
For now, though, there is hope
sprouting between the bricks
in the Mulkey’s paved play-yard,
and certainty springing from the hand
of every Mulkey child. Right now,
this minute, because some prodigal
Mulkey uncle has returned with gifts
for everyone, anything is possible.
Honorable Mention: Joanne Tangorra, Ann Arbor, MI
This Hour
Primitive
our summer rituals,
how we strip down
and need so little,
lights low
inside houses like small fires
burning.
Night, that late-blooming
flower, reveals slowly the dark
it holds close within.
I’m looking in through the screen
of the kitchen window: my life
without me—a father & child,
the woman missing.
I see them as a stranger
might, innocent
of their history,
the two of them edged
in limninal splendor.
Birth is the first flowering, love
the second.
The child is crying,
the stump of his navel
like the brand of a former life,
all that’s left of our complicity.
And then this hour,
First star.
Its distant voice like childhood.
calling me in.
Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Howkins, Ardmore, PA
Family Portrait
A single photograph holds them all
within a slender lasso of frame.
Their bodies stiff as paper flowers
and bright with Halloween colors
are crowded together like toes
in too-tight shoes.
The long years tug stubbornly
at the zipper of their smiles
as, one by one, they extinguish
themselves and drop like pale
blossoms into death.
The frame, empty as a moonstone,
slowly fills up with shadows.
Invisible now in daylight, they
re-ignite themselves in our dreams
soaking up shape and color
and re-attaching the slender masks
of their smiles.
They re-walk the paths of their lives
telling new stories in old places
as they drag their faded colors
from one corner of our dreams
to another and cover our faces
with bitter hymns until morning
when a blade of sun cuts them
loose like little fading stars.
