Award Winning Poetry

The weight of the receiver in my hand:
the down bird in my palm first lifting you.
The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland...

As if the open barrel were a lotus;
its roots anchored in mud.
How undeterred...

Ode, let your sorrows go.
Let brides be ravished, trees forsake their leaves,
let lovers kiss and fade, daughters age.

As if to find new icons for her life
or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine
she scans our purchases too consciously...

A white Ford, black gate, Georgia plate,
squeezes into our lane. In the back, a Whitetail –
tagged and slashed from her chest to hind legs...

A loyal maple lingers by your bed: nature fiercely altered.
Its sugar finds your pulse, then trickles in with a rhythm
partly boy, partly tree.  For comity we call it Mr. Pipes...

What if we let you sing first?
What if we look for you with Mallarme’s
blank stare: birds round an empty dish...

For the rape of Chryssipus, King Laius suffered.
The gods saw what he took -- a young boy's chance
to play in the Nemean Games, to make his offerings...

Before we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound.
If one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked  for you
sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened...

The game was not to look - but feel -
the slow drag, the distant rise
and fall, the quiet revolt of crests...

Early light, the chill of souls leaving. You draw up the sheet
to cover us; the soft of musk, the body's heat
from an air pocket, nudged and wayward. The scent...

I have been told that by wish and will I fell from His sheep-
wool pocket into one dame's arms; and that was birth.
I have been told that angels bowl; heaven opens up when the...

Because we were getting old enough
our instructor took us to look at (not to touch)
some pictures grown men drew...

A portly man on TV says he’s eating jelly donuts
since his doctor recommended more fruit.  My head
tucked beneath your chin, I feel you grin. A welcome joke...

As if in an endless rehearsal,
I packed and unpacked. The challenge,
you said, was to take no more...

In the parish hall of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church,
pictures of murdered children in our hands,
we huddle in a sphere of folding chairs...