Jax Peters Lowell
You were bending over the zinnias
when the hose went slack and he splayed
his fingers over the small of your back,
waltzed you past the day lilies,
swooning in their clay pots.
We’d just finished supper, the neighbors said,
pointing to the spot where he did his Hollywood
dip and your hair dusted the roses,
as an insect orchestra played
in the listening pines.
You in your apron,
he in the torn high tops he wore
to troll for blues, taste of their crackled skins
still in your mouths, your long neck white
against the enfolding night.
Right there, they said,
in the shadow of the darkened house
its garden gone to seed, a summer porch
where a child slept under spinning stars --
absence established a beachhead.
_________________________________________
I.
The sky grows greasy pink
Like rouge scooped from a tin and rubbed on an old lady’s cheek.
The light is dying and so makes itself glamorous one last time.
The light escapes like a girl you loved once, years ago.
(Press the slide of her to the lamp and she appears.)
You remember her back, you remember
how smooth her back was and how it shone
as she turned, as she walked away, down the beach,
as if to promptly return all her beauty to its rightful place.
II.
The oystermen stand out
Knee-deep at low tide, overalls bright as parakeets.
Reaching eagerly into the wet naked mud.
Pulling each oyster out alive, with such urgency
--as though pulling a human body from a crash, a mother, a saloon.
The oysters clutter and shimmer like dark, greasy pennies.
Some crush, some open as if to speak, negotiate,
What tiny shipwrecks pitched into buckets,
the thud and the thud
like whole notes shaken right off a sheet of music.
III.
Sometimes, the world is so muscled with light,
that you hardly know how sick it is. Like the radiance of a bad wound,
the electric complexions of the dying. You’d hardly know
how hurt it is, how fractured
IV.
The dark comes out,
and men loading their trucks speak of meals and wives.
The town reblooms, room by room,
like a coral reef resurfacing. Even the mudflats hiss
beneath their borrowed hints of gold.
When suddenly there arrive! Whole shingles of birds—
night jars—star throats—cream-bellied thrushes—oystercatchers—
hurrying into the gloam, whole sashes pulsing overhead,
all wing and bluster, all optimism, darkening
the gleaming waters, racing the tide and all that glitters.
How they rush and rush their giddy hunger,
Delivering themselves to the Earth’s shore—which reaches out to them almost,
I think, in return. Almost, for a moment, as if she might feed them somehow.
Part I Within the first strophe Mia personifies the sky when she compares it to a woman applying rouge to her face. The way she makes us feels the desperateness of trying to catch the last of the beauty there is in the day as when an old woman tries to hold on to whatever beauty she may have possessed. In the next strophe Mia compares the scene to a girl, bringing us again back to the female, beautiful figure; we can imagine the beachfront being in all its life force.
In part II we can “see” the oystermen. The images that were painted by Mia are another reason this poem is a first-place winner.
In part III use of words such as: ‘radiance of a bad wound’ shows the reader why Dusk creates an award-winning poem.
In part IV we are given such a new way to look at lights coming on at night:
‘The dark comes out,
and men loading their trucks speak of meals and wives.
The town reblooms, room by room’
Take the poem apart and its pieces stand alone; put them all together and it creates a masterpiece.
Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan
Lead Poetry Panelist
_________________________________________
Within this skin --
The bottle blonde knows how to leave a room on six-inch heels.
Her dark sister cuts off her feet to keep from running.
One makes her bed of roses, the other of fears.
Who’s who, you say? No matter. I’ve slept for thirty years.
One says Go -- Drum roll, please. The other, eager to appease
Prays to the two-faced God for the guts to stay.
Their bones are a family under my roof, fractious and loud.
Reasons for. Arguments against. They will carry me either way.
It’s a long walk from then to now.
Pictures offer proof; pose questions. Smiles hung with hints,
Allegations, bifurcations, the squint of tears, joy strung like baby pearls
Along the carapace, caution flung like ashes into the ocean’s undulating face.
One danced through that fire, the other burned her desire.
What if there was only a door’s soft click?
Closing. Opening. Closing again. No questions asked.
A common ground we could occupy. Where neither
Takes poison and waits for the other to die.
Two women, one skin --
We stand at the edge of the slumbering sea,
Dreaming of both shores.
_________________________________________
For Louise and Bob
Both boats move out, slow like swans
Onto the evening
Slicing through blue sliver water
Heading for the sun dance that is the open bay.
Ice laps inside the plastic cups of wine
Last week’s Stilton cheese still tastes of cream.
We drift the wind-warm channel.
A doe, two fawns, are grazing ripened greens onshore. A heron
Rises out of high tide in the stark September light.
The sky goes vast goes crimson wild.
The pleasure is so sure no one is laughing.
We navigate the long late afternoon
Of nearly eighty years,
but we can’t see beyond
The end of summer in each other’s eyes.
Lingering merits 1st place for several reasons, but it is the imagery that Kay creates for us throughout the poem that was the deciding factor, along with her masterful use of alliteration, metaphor and personification. The plastic cups and last week’s Stilton cheese are important details, as they help put the reader into the boat and therefore into the poem. The boaters taste the cream, not the staleness, of week-old cheese, which represents the way we can choose to complain about the pains of advanced years or embrace the sweetness that those years can bring. Kay’s use of stark September lets us know the easy times are coming to a close with the closing of the splendid summer day, as well as the closing of a splendid life. The poem is, on three levels, the day, the season, and the life of the boaters. These details and use of literary devices give Kay Kidde’s poem, Lingering, its first place award.
7 Deadly Sins - First Place
Lust
by Mary Bares –Tubridy
In the absence of illumination
I fell to the seduction of your dark heart.
You broke the pedestal on which I stood,
Melted me like candle wax into a formless mass,
And left my soul to harden.
In the presence of darkness
I have stolen your soul with my clever heart.
I have whipped you to the bare bones,
And left your body torn and scorched.
I am an empty shell on a desolate beach
Bleaching in the hot unforgiving sun.
Stripped of all my senses, naked to myself,
I have forsaken strength for the pleasure of you.
You are standing exposed
Not knowing what happened.
Full of holes where only darkness passes,
You have divulged everything.
We are now naked face to face
Destroyed by our own hungers and pleasures.
In darkness there is only longing and distance.
_________________________________________
COMMENTS FROM THE JURY:
In the absence of illumination
(there’s a clever use of words in this opening line: “absence of illumination,” instead of simply “darkness”)
I have stolen your soul with my clever heart.
I have whipped you to the bare bones,
(nice parallel construction “I have” in the 2 lines--I am now wondering why “clever and whipped”)
And left your body torn and scorched.
(this line brings us back to the image of the wax, the burning,
the heat of lust)
I am an empty shell on a desolate beach
(great image!)
Bleaching in the hot unforgiving sun.
Stripped of all my senses, naked to myself,
I have forsaken strength for the pleasure of you.
(great line; “forsaken” also invokes God)
Full of holes where only darkness passes,
(great sentence, SHOWS RATHER THAN TELLS!!!!)
The poetic phrasing cited above shows why we felt this poem deserved first place.
Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan
EEAC Poetry Panel Chairperson
President, The North Sea Poetry Scene, Inc
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Our Vineyard Vignettes Show (August 4- September 8) includes poetry judged by our new, highly credentialed poetry panel: Gladys Henderson, Walter E. Harris lll (Mankh), former Poet Laureate George Wallace and Pulitzer Prize nominee, Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan. This show’s winner is Miranda Beeson, for her poem White Lilacs.
White Lilacs
If I lived in the country right now
I would write a poem about white lilacs,
how their perfume ushers in summer
how I prefer the white ones
to their pale purple cousins,
how the trajectory of their blooms
remind me of the deep contented
droop of childhood evenings
when it was still possible to
fall off the edge of the day
into a dreamy sleep so sure
all was right with a world
called downstairs:
creak of pine floorboards,
quiet hum of conversation,
last of the twilight bird calls.
As committee chairperson, Tammy shares her comments on why White Lilacs won the competition:
What makes this poem work is how the poet takes us from where we are at the present moment, with whatever thoughts are flooding our brains before we started to read the poem, and stops those thoughts suddenly and transports us to a place we did not expect to go. She returns us to that childhood place we used to live in, or wish we had lived in. The imagery and the cadence of the poem carry us through smoothly to its conclusion.
She draws us in with her opening line: If I lived in the country right now I would write a poem about white lilacs, o.k. I’m hooked!
In her next line she makes use of personification when she writes: how their perfume ushers in summer (the perfume ushers).
In the line: how I prefer the white ones to their pale purple cousins the poet applies alliteration with the words prefer, pale and purple.
In the next lines:
how the trajectory of their blooms
remind me of the deep contented
droop of childhood evenings
when it was still possible to
we go through a transition with her back to our own childhood; the language will get simpler now. Don’t overlook the splendor of: deep contented droop of childhood evenings
The next two lines: fall off the edge of the day/ into a dreamy sleep so sure
(alliteration again!)
She makes you remember what it felt like falling into that deep contented worriless sleep of youth.
all was right with a world
called downstairs:
Remember when the world was this small, this simple?
It was called downstairs!
The closing lines tuck us in with the sounds we fell asleep to:
creak of pine floorboards,
quiet hum of conversation,
last of the twilight bird calls.
Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan
EEAC Poetry Panel Lead Jurist
President, The North sea Poetry Scene, Inc.
