“Art in the Air” Poetry Contest
Winners
March 2003
Theme: Loss
First Prize—$100
John Hodgen, Shrewsbury, MA—Three poems
For My Nigerian Student Who Will Not Believe
That Men Have Landed on the Moon
No, she says, and her eyes grow large,
two black moons, eclipsed.
I show her chunky astronauts, frolicking,
gamboling, one small step after another,
the blare of light like aureoles
on the round black visors of their helmets.
No, she says, they are men, nothing more,
and men cannot dance on the face of the moon.
The moon is so far and the men are so small.
Only dreams can go there
and the words that fly out of my heart.
The moon is the eye of the old one, she says,
still awake in the house of the night.
It is the mother who cradles us deep in our sleep.
And no one could walk on that face, on that light.
I look in her eyes and I know she is right.
***
For Mr. Grimes Who Tried To Teach
Me Physics After My Father Died
He spoke of ellipses,
of things coming round again.
He spoke of resistance,
of the forces that act upon us.
He spoke of gravity,
of the earth that draws us to itself.
He said the mass of the earth,
the changes of state.
He said that a body at rest
would remain at rest.
He said that a boy
standing at the end of a moving train
could toss the red ball of his life
up into the heavy air
and catch it again.
***
Upon Hearing That Among Marilyn Monroe’s Personal Effects Found
After Her Death Was a Signed Photograph From Albert Einstein
Inscribed With the Words, “With Respect and Love and Thanks”
Had they come together, beaker and bombshell,
like two asteroids meeting, like some big bang,
had they fallen for each other like twin Niagaras,
or perched like two cheesecakes on the HOLLYWOOD sign,
we all would have studied the sweet science of love,
shouted Eureka instead of Oh, God,
bliss would have blossomed above every bus stop,
until every man’s hair stood up straight and unkempt,
and each woman’s dress lifted up in the street.
All things are relative, theoretically,
and the stars simply wait to be named and adored,
but if there exists an alternative universe,
Alamogordo remembered or Paramount dreamed,
where God throws His dice in the crapshoot of love,
where blondes prefer gentlemen, where physics comes easy,
perhaps they are married, a nuclear family,
their children in labcoats and abnormal genes,
Marilyn knee-deep in emotional postulates,
Albert all smiles, like the MGM lion, midriff bared,
their energies balanced in motion and light, E=MC2.
Second Prize—$50
Gianmarc Manzione, New York, NY
Love in the Modern Age
1
Fresh off
A plane from Florida, your arms
Gather the ghosts of my heart.
2
Took a year to gnaw Love
Down to three condoms
And a candy bar.
3
Nights were
Pieces of melon
In our throats, but
4
We knew better
Than that, our tongues
As trustful as cats
5
In dark and creaky rooms, always
This loneliness
Like a two-ton quilt pulled
6
Hard over my head,
I collapse
Into wooden floors
7
Like rain
Through holey roofs, this is
Desire, I guess—
8
Each moment of my life
Is a place other than
Where I am.
Honorable Mention
Hiram Larew, Upper Marlboro, MD
What I Learned At the Barber’s
Later we’d remember
How he seemed that day
Like water in cupped hands
Smiling like loose shoestrings
Quiet—meaning we had to guess a lot
Everything that got said
Got said halfway
And he acted and we acted like
The morning was a happy mistake
A wrapped up gift with no name on it
It was later after we heard what happened
That we thought of his eyes
Trying to remember
What they had said
How they felt like promises on us
That hadn’t even been made yet
How they treated us like important papers
How those eyes that morning left us smack dab
In the middle of could be
When we got word
Most of us were almost in the same spot stunned
A few of us
The ones who needed to
Pretty quickly started right then
To put him away inside of us
Like an apple seed
For good.
Honorable Mention
Michelle Bitting, Pacific Palisades, CA
Trees
My mother worries about trees in my yard,
the Eucalyptus, their overgrown heads,
how a bold October wind
could roll the leaf-heavy blankets
down to smother us, curled in our sleep.
She’s minus a son already—
so statistics on falling
trees are meaningless, she
moves a beat ahead
of doom’s grim boot.
Men arrive with ropes
and saws. A whisper chipper
settles in, blocks half
the driveway. As the first
sweeps of lopped green
drop from the sky,
slapping the startled lawn,
I can’t help but think
of my brother,
his long, beautiful hair—
honey-brown in summer,
falling across tanned cheeks
every girl in school
longed to taste, below,
the athlete’s torso
they dreamed of exercising.
When he died
I drove with my parents
to the stuffy Tudor
on Montana Avenue
where he became a box
of dust, soft and gray
as rabbit ears.
The stiff man in pinstripes
handed my father a sack—
the clothes your son was wearing—
he said, apologizing.
Steering home
we pulled over to review
the balled-up-tee-shirt,
sweatpants, underwear—
suicide rags,
his Great Escape suit.
And it was then, seeing
how little was left,
bringing my brother home in a paper bag,
I saw my father lurch,
topple forward,
his heart tumbling down,
catching ours with the crush of it,
and I knew there was no point in scurrying
or calling for help—
we could never get out of the way.
Honorable Mention
Geri Rosenzweig, Ossining, NY
Saint Joseph’s Nursing Home, Ireland
With nothing in my mouth
but the salt of old times,
I came to the ringing down
of the leaves, to the flower
nodding its head
in the window box
of my mother’s last window.
Her voice lifted dry as weeds
in the driveway of the nursing home,
light wavered
on her forehead,
a hammer coughed
in the garden as workmen
raised a gazebo
in what was left of summer.
To make time pass between us,
we composed a past
in which neither recognized the other.
I held her hands from plucking
the sheets, offered the charity
of water from a plastic cup,
promised to come again,
before it’s too late,
before they throw out
her cracked slipper
and the weather turns cold,
before strangers inherit
her front door and she
becomes a hallway of regret
I walk through at dusk,
my face stunned as a child’s
at how suddenly
the story ends.
Honorable Mention
Mark Stevick, Glouster, MA
Waiting Up
There’s a table in the center of the room
and the ceiling is pale and very close,
there’s the sound of rain and nobody is home,
nobody else to help hold up the house.
There’s a black lacquer table and it’s holding
a candle that stands beyond the windowpane,
its fire is polished brass and barely moving
and the midnight sitting room is dark as rain.
Upstairs the air is dark but the bed is made
there’s a book somewhere I haven’t been reading,
downstairs the bookshelves have been newly arranged
and the black lacquer tabletop is peeling.
Wax has been dulling the brass candlestick
and the edges of the flower are folded.
Although the sharp edges of the flame reflect
in the picture frame the faces are clouded.
All the room’s dark furnishings conserve their strength;
the black table bears what I need to survive—
the taper, the portrait, and the hyacinth.
When I get up, all the windows throw their knives.
Honorable Mention
Virginia Chase Sutton, Tempe, AZ
Never Construct Narrative
1.
Huge shadow erection, a strange inflatable balloon
stolen from a bizarre parade,
sort of like the blow-up doll
we discovered in an unused room
at my daughter’s school, pile of porn
magazines, someone’s hiding place.
Only this is on the ceiling. Look away,
count to twenty. It’s still there.
How can it rise when the conscious
argues, not so?
2.
I’m thirteen again, brand new baby-sitter.
One child adores me as I sit on the floor
and play dolls. But the eighteen-month-old
runs, though when it’s time to change her diaper,
she allows me to lift her to the table,
unpin the soaking cloth. And it’s true, thirty years later,
in this mix of vulnerability and business-
as-usual, I’m thinking how easy to harm a child,
and no one would ever know.
3.
Streaky smoke from a thousand packs of cigarettes,
my childhood’s familiar fragrance,
overwhelming. I smell it when I make
my grandmother’s date-nut pudding,
my father’s favorite, on Christmas Eve,
in my therapist’s office. Curious times.
Do you smell cigarettes? I ask my daughter
in line at the grocery store. Mom,
no one’s smoking here, she says in a patient voice
I’m beginning to dislike. There’s
no one smoking at all.
4.
My father’s final words were
a song—Good Night Ladies.
Then he died. Tonight
at the movies I hear him singing
beside me, but I don’t bother to turn
while he sings many brave hearts
are asleep in the deep,
so beware, still trying
for the low note.
5.
Do you want to know why
it’s an error to create narrative,
the doctor asks. Please explain
the memories, odors, what I see
on the ceiling. Your mind
reveals a glimpse of what’s
too painful to remember more fully.
All you get are scraps.
Lemons from the tree
in the front yard,
chopped into wedges, so sour
I squirm in yellow waves of juice.
It’s everywhere and
it stains as it stings.
