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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3516 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Geraldine and Tom Laurie Byro The fields were muddy (all the rain, like a hurricane) straw spread too late didn’t help. Words were scraped then hung out to dry, vowels and syllables, nouns— a sestina begun that morning swallowed into footprints, disappeared into thick Rumi sounds. I drove early hours, New Jersey sliced into highways. My Clark’s scuffed from London, I lost their tracks. Mud splattered my New England jeans. I looked at it like a game. Atmosphere, words bounced off trees, a field of crows picking up seeds, a snippet of paper— someone had scrawled a couplet, a phone number. Later driving through the dark, the glare of headlights, nothing like a poem. My mother on her couch, chiggers from walking pine boughs. I scratched at us both until our skin bled. Two nights by the sea, to free my wrists. Forests and sand dunes leading to the ocean. Seagulls curtsied and swooped. Beach glass the color of moss dodged our ankles. Incandescent shells like somebody’s nails made us follow the slant of the sun. Past the driftwood, bleached silver, my hair was beginning to turn. The scrubby trees made me tell about the Pineys, their bony grasping fingers, and red-berry eyes. A field of sunflowers, blackened from heat, paths rippled from last week’s rain. I sucked you behind the stalks of summer, pecked the hairs on your legs like a crow. Trumpets of consonants floated into the air. We reached for them like a kite we’d lost to wind. |
