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Bashō Bash (Winning Poem)

rare winter lightning
cold and thunder share the sky
one perfect snowflake

50 Years with Grace

Mary Winklebleck Award (3rd Place Winner)

50 Years with Grace

Grandma’s eulogy was the naked truth,
in church no less; Charles told it all,
how he met her during the Palm Sunday
tornadoes – right there in the third pew,
soaked in her too-thin spring dress, thighs
pale, panties the color of plum butter
sparking fugitive notions between prayers—
to hear him tell it, they were greedy
magpies stealing glimpses of each other
as the storm boiled over the ridge-line
confining them to each other’s embrace
for 50 years — they were both contented
birds in a cage with an open door, watching
a blurring thresher harvest thousands of days
while Grandma remained timeless, forever
seventeen in the third pew – peaceful now
as a sleeping honeybee in amber. The choir
rose, singing Hallelujah as Charles dipped
his hand into the water, made the sign
of the cross, put on his black derby
and walked out into a hot August downpour,
heat lightning and potato-juice rain.

Leaving Mother Chechnya

Amy L. Dengler Award (Winning Poem)

Leaving Mother Chechnya

My wife’s arms ached the night after
the orphanage turned us down, “No ties
to our culture; no way for the baby
to learn the ways of mother Chechnya.”

The orphaned girl with the scars may die,
“probably” is the Chechen translation,
and my wife sobs, rubbing her pale belly,
becoming an inconsolable quavering heap
on the sterile bathroom floor — her womb
a starving mouth waiting to be fed,

and she tells me she can feel it now,
rolling like an empty stomach, vacuous
in a way I can never fill, withering
by the hour. Waiting for our plane,
every foreign second feels like falling.