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.
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.
There is a long window that doesn’t open
overlooking the parking lot. In its
recess, a black leggy thing, weightless
and still, lays on its side. It is
to fly as the thing in the bed is to
my mother — holding only the shape
and none of the spontaneity. She too is
weightless, buoyant in the heavy air,
adrift in familiar halls — fourteen
disbelieving eyes stare at a shucked husk.
What do you dream about, blind man? Voices
coming from below the ground, long canes,
longer than the world is deep?
Do you imagine you have experienced sight,
a great salty yawn spilling cracked oysters,
each unique odorous texture a vision?
I wish you would wake and tell me your dreams,
in words sufficient enough to remove my vision,
forever in the way of what you see.
Four years old — allowed
to wander the length of the dock
to the end, where I was,
a stranger in blue
looking across the water
waiting for something—a twinge
against the tightness of green
braided line extending in-
to the slippery heavy.
I saw him before, the day he fell
hard on the planks, tripped on his own
dog. He sat down beside me
until he heard his mother
from the shore, hollering,
“come now, Joshua, now before the rain
catches you.” He stood, too close,
the way kids do sometimes, asking,
“You remember the day I fell
right here?” pointing
the smallness of his fingers
to a scar leftover on his chin.
“My dad left that day. He said
he’ll be back in three days.
How long is three days?
Nobody will tell me.”
Annie Lebawits shot him,
Jagger shirtless—elevated
from man to Rolling Stone.
If he were any other man
we’d say he looks skeletal
today, but he’s still going,
doing it, with his lips
pressed out, Tumbling Dice.
He is as Annie showed us,
frozen in time, shirtless
forever singing Wild Horses.
