Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2018 10:31 am
by M
Many thanks to those who participated in making nominations for our IBPC submissions this month. We really appreciate those who stepped up to make nominations when we had none. And we thank our nominees 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 February 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 February 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 (If there are any). 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. Also note that if there are no nominations/acceptances in any given month and no holdovers from the prior month, there will be no IBPC submissions sent from WPF that month.

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

Love,
M

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February 218 IBPC Submissions from Wild Poetry Forum


Poem # 1
Title: The Ravine
Author: Kenny A. Chaffin


It was on the far west side of our land, downhill from the house. Not much of a ravine really. Nothing like the ones the plains Indians stampeded buffalo over; more of a steep slope where water drained and rapidly disappeared into the dry Southern Oklahoma soil after the cloudbursts. It was mostly consumed by scrub oak and stunted bodark trees with long needle-sharp thorns. Even with the scrub there was a need to fill it, to keep it from eroding, from washing away the soil. Everything went there. Dead horses, dead washing machines, old buckets and rusty barrels, an old truck bed and axles, broken TVs, radios, cut brush and rotting timber, but not Sissy. No, Not Sissy. She was buried under the locust tree on the East side of the house, all the children crying and me responsible.

-END-

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Poem # 2
Title: Lovers These Days
Author: Sergio Ortiz
E-Mail: sergiortiz211@aol.com
Wild Poetry Forum

Both dressed in impudence.
Blue jeans glued to their thighs.
Beards, shaved heads, so young
it was scary, absorbed
by an imaginary point,
never seeing each other,
joined by nothing,
or something so fiercely pure
it couldn’t be seen.

Walked hand in hand to all places.
Loved without sadness, or joy,
or anything else. Looked at each other
yet saw nothing. Sat on a bench
without hearing each other's voices.
One, very attractive but stunned,
the other fierce and emaciated.
They didn't talk, had nothing to say.
Together without any desire,
frightened, yet still holding hands.


-END-

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Poem # 3
Title: Night Can Be An Ache
Author: Guy Kettelhack
E-Mail: guyblakekett@aol.com
Wild Poetry Forum

Night can be an ache.
In sinuses, and knees, the cramping in your leg.
But surely no ache here: not in this phantasm lake
around which on a diamond day your dream had just
begun: you sat in velvet grass and strummed guitar
and sang upon its comfortable shore to an audience
of one: your reflection in the water.
High baritone notes in good order:
.
“When I first saw your gallery,
I liked the ones of ladies…”
.
Your head held her long-vanished flight
of soprano, probing piano, too strange
a condition of beauty to think of for long.
.
Plucking single notes of basic chords on your guitar,
D minor and G major, all were kindergarten Joni Mitchell:
by that point in the song’s alchemy, she’d conjured
harmonies already having intimate relations with the thin
edge of the stratosphere; picking resonances in it like
plucking pizzicati on a violin.
.
Your reflection on the surface of the lake dispersed
first into sparks, mosaic bits of atmosphere floated
half a second, then shot downward as if instantly become
lead pellets blasted out of a gun, but aimed at the bottom;
the bottom was a destiny. The water was a beryl red:
looked like blood newly bled, but more translucent.
What “you” were you who saw this?
.
“You” were at the bottom looking at your re-configured
face and head, crimson in the half-lit liquid, shaped into
a yowl. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t singing now. If this
was you, you were dead. If whatever said these words to you
were you, you weren’t anything you knew. You couldn’t
even say that you’d been here, much less gone.
.
Not a thing need be remembered.
So you forgot, and went on.

-END-

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