Winner
Tim Wood
Marginalia Inter Alia
Found the word lonely
sketched next to the first poem
and revenge, and love,
and poor scribbled on other pages.
A smudged happy by the line
“Here by myself, I do as I please.”
Nothing after page 9. Unread?
The rest of the poems rest
unmarked
like pods of birds I saw lift off of
a telephone wire this morning.
I thought about
how easy it is
to find words for this and turn them
into a poetic line.
In fact, I’m sure
this line has already been written
and glossed,
bulwarked against
a lightly penciled freedom.
Even so, we sing of dreams
and say we’re not guilty
of what we’ve been accused
and look for rescue in cues
taken from augury, jury verdicts, fame,
anything that erases
the names we give to things,
a tourniquet of etiquette we turn into
a word to sum up what we feel when
the train derails in the rain
and we hear of injuries and deaths. In this life,
so full of flaws and accident, what is it
that calls us to wonder,
that breaks into our logic and wrecks,
inter alia,
what we thought the world was
before we took note of it
and wrote it down?
Runner-Up
Jim Garber
Apology
I am sorry:
That look you gave me last night
was the same one I gave you
that Thursday in March.
The ground remained frozen,
the plants deeply asleep
from an overly long winter.
I meant not a word of that look.
My feelings were there or here or neither.
I wanted to take it back, stow it under the bed,
seal it with wax, erase it from our hard drive,
tuck it away from your line of vision,
bury it in remote furrows of a barren field;
place it in the deepest recesses of a box,
so you could only find it
when frantically looking
for something else.