Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 5:40 pm
by M
Many thanks to those who participated in making nominations for our IBPC submissions this month. We thank the two entrants who stepped up at the last minute with their poems, and we thank all three for allowing us the pleasure of having them represent WPF in the competition.

To our entrants, please look over the poems. The poems will be submitted on April 3rd, as they appear below. If the entrants have any edits or corrections to the poems, please send them to me at mjm@wildpoetryforum.com by the morning of April 3rd. If you come upon this notice late and you have edits, please send me any edits anyway. I will try to have the submission updated before it's sent to the judge.

As a reminder, if there are no or not enough IBPC nominations in any given month from the membership, we choose from the eligible poems (those poets who gave permission) from the prior month. So, if your poem was not selected in any given month, please know that you still might have an opportunity for it to be submitted the following month.

Congratulations to our entrants and best of luck in the competition!

Love,
M

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Poem # 1
Title: Three Reasons Why You Can’t Hear Me
Author: Laura Ring

1.

Because the water from the arroyo
has made its way to the canyon and falls
like the stomp of a thousand bell-strung feet –
some ancient choreography.

I am the parched aquifer that calls out
for rain, voice made gravel by a decade
of hardened roots, embittered soil.
You, the runoff that can’t be captured,
shouting your way to the sea.

2.

If you can’t hear me, it’s because these valleys
are loud with dreams. The vines tip their leaves
to the sun and sing their promises.

You are the wine-stained feet and the golden
casks. Me, the armed border and bent backs.
Words turn to grapes in my mouth and burst,
spill the sugar of their life’s work – drunken
prayer, sorry never to have made it to your cup.

3.

You can’t hear me because this freeway will brook
no impediment. Bedrock. Shoreline. Change
in elevation. Everyone hauls cargo – wants

out of season. Lives we thought to escape. Not even
a chasm in the earth can slow your journey. This road
will blast through mountains. And voices seldom carry
across partings.

-END-

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Poem # 2
Title: The Sorrow of Hearts
Author: Andrew Dufresne


All day I have been rearranging my body
to fit the world. It's hopeless. I can't leave
anything behind. I drag all memories
after, a kite’s tail in a blue-grey sky.

Flying, I can see fields below, fields where
I once played, had my first kiss. There
is the young girl I taught to be cruel when
I was so cruel to her. I sigh. She laughs.

All my former selves live together in
a small house frozen in that one moment
when you think nobody is looking. They
argue about everything, forever.

We forget goodness, are famished
for kindness, nothing is enough. Nothing
except sorrow. The sorrow of hearts spills
into all souls. Nowhere else to keep it.

-END-

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Poem # 3
Title: Sunrise
Author: Kenny A. Chaffin


The light arrives by truck this morning
an 18-wheeled Peterbilt growling into the sky
the brilliant sun lashed to its flatbed trailer.
In the cab a burly trucker with a scraggly beard
and a belly the size of a barrel wrestles the massive
wheel, grinding the gears as they climb into the heavens.

The driver looks nothing like Apollo or Helios, in fact
he looks more like uncle Strat that I don’t much care for
what with his overwhelming aroma of whiskey,
tobacco juice leaking from the corner of his mouth,
and a scowl for every passerby. I look up again to the
brutish Peterbilt driver making his way across the sky,
I give him a nod and smile, thankful for the light.

-END-

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