OUR ANNUAL POETRY CONTEST WILL BE IN APRIL OF 2021. DETAILS TO COME. POETRY CONTEST WINNERS FOR 2020: Our judge has returned the verdicts early, and here are the winning entries: First Place: Maureen Woodcock for A Mourning Cope Be wary. He's dead and widows embroider. Scattered lover's sins are drawn together, tiny black stitches, forbidden to be full-sized.
Dead, his goodness is padded and enhanced. It stands high and gaudy, a golden dragon sewn to the back of a shogun's silk kimono.
Be wary. Widows live and they embroider. Their eyes have weakened. Their truths are sloppy, looped and tangled nots.
Second Place: Michael E. Murphy for Pity the Plumeria Tree
Pity the poor plumeria tree: no white flowers again this year; its green, oblong leaves fall before their prime again, expose its skeletal frame like a desert fossil.
We’d never asked all that much of the plumeria---neither the shade nor the elegance the others give--- only that it be a privacy screen between our patio and the passersby.
Perhaps it thinks itself the orphan we’d adopted, the child with atavistic traits we could not recognize, the one whom teachers sent home with notes, the kid who missed the open goal,
the young man who left for the hills with The Wanderers---the son for whom we’d kill the fatted calf if only he’d come back home to us, be the new leaf on our plumeria tree.
Third Place: Mark Melnick for I Was a Free Man, Once, in Saigon
I spent my last piaster And we danced away the waste, Radiant in the O.D. past tense, Content, two dying moths ablaze.
She’d walked in slow, through smoky haze, In the heat of another Bien Hoa night game,
It felt like we might last till morning, And I shrugged away the lanky frenchgirl, In her cool and practiced tiny hand.
The night was ours in this very last place, Two short-short-short short-timers there, We’d both fly home in the gray good light.
I made a choice between two souls. But the blonde remains, and the memory she stole.
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