Spring 2020 Poetry Contest Winners

1st Place 

THE YOUNG MAN & THE SEA BY COLE DEPUY

         Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so. –Ernest Hemingway

We crack glow sticks, slip them into balloons,
clip the knots to fishing line & watch the fluorescent float
60-miles inside a blue-black distance. The North
Atlantic Dropoff – we hover above a cliff without freefall,
an emptiness no different than the starless sky. The ship
creaks, waves lap. We smoke, hold cigars arms-length
from the rods. Our eyes fastened to the glowing bulbs.
They roll in-and-out of sight. I lean into the railing,
my hips a perfect fit: don't jump, I've heard this before.
The ship's hull has blue lights, illuminates an underwater
fog – our own balloon solidifies the water, gives
the perception we need. A school of squid swims below.
Captain slaps an oar into the sea-skin, they vanish, leave
fading ink as well. The air sucks out of me: I'm underwater
& silence thickens into a tongue crowning the surface.
A tiger shark lurks below. I've never seen something
so large so quiet. Only water displacement between us. Nocturnal,
serrated, surface. The ocean eight-times saltier than my body,
I could dilute the sea: My presence, an absence. A balloon
goes missing. We toss the cigars overboard & reel the extra
lines: One buzzes. I strap on a rod belt, lean back & lift:
trying to eat the space. My drag cranks, the fish doesn't
let up, my shoulders burn. The fisherman chirp: Keep the line
tight! Watch the engine! He's pulling you around! Everyone wants
the rod, they circle me like sharks, know they can do better:
Harness the buoyancy, might something ten times their size.
The ocean lifts with us, offers a gift to the air, then refuses
to let go. Captain says it's a giant stingray, the way she fights
– he is wrong – over an hour until we see a white chest;
it rolls & blows from a spout: the spray of kin. Captain yells,
It's a pilot whale! You foul-hooked the bastard! I see the hook
snagged to its side, still threading a herring. I had pulled
the mammal backwards, twenty million years, back to when
whales walked as hoofed creatures the size of cats. Captain cuts
the line. I snatch what’s left & fold overboard, splash into
the frigid blue & grab hold of the beast: my head to its tail,
I begin a journey backwards now. Shrinking the places
I've been as I feel the ocean ceiling rise. It will not be long
until I surface again.

Cole Depuy’s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in The Penn Review, The Maynard, The West Trade Review, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is a Ph.D. student at SUNY Binghamton, an instructor for the Binghamton Poetry Project, and recipient of the Provost’s Doctoral Summer Fellowship.

 2nd Place

THE ROBIN DOES NOT KNOW BY JESSICA BARKSDALE

Inside the darkened house, the pandemic
is our slick, unwelcome guest, gobbling

up the internet, time, and conversation.
We can’t shut him up, this viral king,

this apocalypse harbinger we’ve nurtured
in verse and song, this pale-horsed terror,

this Kali Yuga, this Ragnarok, this end-of-times poster prince.
He slides into bed between us, whispering all night

about toilet paper and our children who live faraway.
So sad, he murmurs. Tragic.

He chuckles over the grandchild
we can see only through sent photos,

our parents who are on lockdown, their frail, papery
bodies defenseless against the king’s sharp

claws. Move over, he says, nestling close, wrapping
arms around us both. Breathe me in.

He snores loud and long, a sinus
drumbeat of die, die, die. In the wee hours,

we sneak out of bed, huddle together near the fire,
plot grocery runs, plan doctor calls, evaluate milk and bread stores.

Meanwhile, outside, the sun comes up, predictable
as the king but more frequent. The frogs croak

awake, the Canada geese honk, the robin perches atop
the blossoming plum and sings over and over and over

It is almost spring. It will be spring, and then it will be summer.
The king will leave our bed, clinging to the ratty edge

of a garage couch, unlistened to.
Go, we whisper, now.

Jessica Barksdale’s fifteenth novel, The Play’s the Thing, is forthcoming from TouchPoint Press in 2021. Her debut poetry collection When We Almost Drowned was published in March 2019 by Finishing Line Press. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest.

3rd Place

SWEETHEART BY JAYNE BROWN

It surprised me when I called you that.
“Sweetheart,”—not mom, not mommy.
“Sweetheart, you’re doing so good.”
And you were, light years ahead of me,
bent into your center,
hunkered down like a woman in labor
deep in the thick, hard work
to deliver yourself
from your (well-) spent body.
Daddy used to whistle that song,
even sing it to you sometimes.
“Let me call you sweetheart,”
on our long trips through the southwest—
Zion, Bryce, the Painted Desert—
while we sat reading, rolling eyes, in the back seats
of the big-finned Ford, the Plymouth Fury.
And maybe he’s waiting in the wings
To croon his tune to you again.
Long ago not long ago
I told his ghost, “You can’t have her yet.”
But you’re not ours anymore.
You’re gone beyond,
almost gone to the other shore.
You woke up once and said
you had to make the movie stop.
“Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy,”
Judy Garland sang. I stood to turn the TV off,
then realized you meant everything.
We flickered there in black and white,
waiting to be gone beyond.
My brother whispered in your ear,
“It’s okay, Mom, you can let go.”
From your still body, your old strong voice—
“I’m not going anywhere!”
Oh, Sweetheart—
Sweetheart, let me call you that.

Jayne Relaford Brown is the 2019-2021 Poet Laureate for Berks County, Pennsylvania. She is the author of My First Real Tree, a book of poems from FootHills Publications. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Blueline, Cider Press Review, Alligator Juniper, All We Know of Pleasure, and as the title poem in I Am Becoming the Woman I’ve Wanted. Brown was a finalist in this year’s Steve Kowit poetry competition. She received an MFA from San Diego State, and taught college writing in San Diego and Pennsylvania until retiring in 2018.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical by poet last name)

Tattooist’s Needle, Jewish Museum
by Melissa Fadul

I come from
women starving
for sleep—
chapped lips stuck
to deflated breasts.
A prisoner’s palm,
clenched & closed
under his
control.
His fingers
steered me
where
to crawl,
dig & drag
through
convoys
of skin—
He taught
me the art
of etching
& scraping
numbers
into
arms.
I hold
drops
of
dried
blood
and
luck
on
my
tip.

Melissa Fadul lives in New York with her wife and teaches advanced placement psychology and classical literature in a public high school in Queens, New York. She has been an educator for seventeen years. She has a loving Maltese dog named Linus and a very peaceful bunny named Roggie. Melissa is currently completing a poetry manuscript and is nervous but excited about the negative capability that accompanies such an endeavor. For readings and appearances, you can contact Melissa at melissafadul@gmail.com.

Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror*  
by Jessica Jones

He thinks my body is renaissance
perfect. No small supermodel bones
to bear, but full of curved, intellectual
question marks, round with fertility,
full like our years together.

He tells me Bellini brushed my
skin with ivory – precious
commodity wrapped safely in his arms.
He says canvas can't convey what he learns
in soft caresses – texture like satin, warmed
by Scottish blood. Soft pink with blushing,
Red with anger, burgundy burning with ecstasy.

He begs for long kisses, deep embraces,
moments laying his head on my round stomach
looking up into me – hovering in our present,
heaving small breasts and wild spirit.

He asks me how to form words when each one
begs of proposal. He prays. He asks
God to bless our food and to send him home
every night to me – naked-aproned in the kitchen
with the scent of lamb lifting up my ruffles.

He wonders when he'll see me again, what we'll
eat for breakfast, where his fingers belong
when they're not intertwined with mine.

*The title of Bellini's first female nude

Jessica Jones graduated from the University of South Alabama with a B.A. in English in 2007, and earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing in 2009. She published her first book of poetry in 2009. Her poetry awards include the Shelley Memorial Scholarship and awards by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Poets and Patrons Chicagoland, and the Alabama State Poetry Society. She was the chairperson for the Alabama Poet Laureate nominations board, newsletter editor for the Alabama Writers' Cooperative, and event coordinator for the Alabama State Poetry Society. She is the current Vice President/Program Chair of the Alabama Writers Cooperative.

A Bluebird’s Song  by Marianne Lyon

A cool     golden evening
offers a place of repose

Nearby      purling creek
converses with my nameless sorrow

A lone bluebird      high
in clannish family of willows
intones a language that is so
sharp      I want to cry

Long to release lingering distress
from my breast

Suddenly galloping tempo of her canto
slows from presto to lingering lento

I begin to feel that each note
is as long as a lifetime

All the while bluebird continues
building little towers of melodies
as if rejoicing in a duet
to and from my own heart
sweeping my walls away

Marianne has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.

Deadheading in Late August by Lee Parpart

Almost Labor Day. I’m telling the dead
from the living, digging through spent
blooms to prolong a box of fading beauty.

Dirty fingernails make a good guillotine,
the judgements rendered all correct, until
speed overtakes precision, and an unopened
bud lands in the clippings bin, weeks early.

My eyes aren’t what they used to be.
Babies sometimes resemble old men,
their folds and wrinkles confounding sense.

One moment of inattention, a cluster of
becoming lost — the world, and this
window box poorer, less lovely.

Struggling bloom pinched from my body,
bundle of promise sent back for bad timing,
where are you now, in this world’s big basket?

I thought I sensed you again the
other day, this time amid the brisk
movements of an older woman
churning up our street in
sundress and sandals.

I noticed her from across the road —
watched her break stride just long
enough to plunge an arm into a late-
blooming sage and crimp it, hard,
stealing scent.

All this took only seconds — the pause,
the reach, the leaves pressed between
eager fingers — like when I test your
sister’s hair for dampness before
sending her into the cold.

But when she released the stalk and touched
her face, inhaled, I felt you there — ionic
presence leaping from plume to palm.

I was sure it was you, or that part of you
that follows us from house to house,
dwelling not with us but always near us,
taking care not to startle.

Yes, it was you — a child waiting, still,
silent as the air on my neck, and just as real.

Lee Parpart worked as a journalist and film academic before returning to poetry and short fiction in 2015, and simultaneously becoming a full-time editor. Her essays, journalism, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in POV; C; 17 seconds; Silver Birch Press, Gendering the Nation; North of Everything; Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Cultures; Athena’s Daughters; The Gendered Screen; Canadian Journal of Film Studies; The Nancy Drew Anthology and The Globe and Mail, and are forthcoming in periodicities. She won an emerging writer prize for short fiction in 2016 through Open Book: Ontario, and edits full-time for Iguana Books in Toronto.

[Applause]  by Joshua Plack

I will die in a hospital bed in whatever
town I find myself in when the winds
that have carried me decide to hold
their breath. On a bland midday a cheesy
game show will flicker across the tiny
television dangling above me with
cash and prizes and drips, beeps and
beats, that sleek new vacuum cleaner,
a ventilator, and a live studio audience.

The host will stand before me in those
suits like thrift store couches and tepid
blonde models walk past my amazing
Craftmatic adjustable bed that reclines
to any position and has built-in heating
massage and how much do you want to bid?

Contestants will look flustered for me
and the cameras, unsure how to exist like
someone has jammed a dozen tubes into
moist orifices old and new. A glittering
wheel will spin forcefully, the lights
and numbers like blades cutting through
the air waves, fluttering by like the days
as my pulse slowing along with the wheel,
the beeps becoming labored, less frequent,
until it all labors to a stop and the audience
explodes with applause... I’m sorry, but

we have some lovely parting gifts, though.

Joshua Plack hails from Philadelphia and studied English Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Oregon, where he won scholarship into the KIDD program, a workshop which included mentoring from well-established authors. He recently won the Matthew Knight Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Shirley McClure Poetry Award. His work has been featured in literary journals such as the Pinyon Review, Inkwell, the Underground, and Coffin Bell.

My Eight-Year-Old Grandmother by Scott Ruescher

In the only photograph I have of my great-great-grandfather
On my father’s maternal side, taken on a summer day
Against the clapboard background of the house on Maple Street
That my father was born in, in Plain City, Ohio, 
In 1919, I see, by light of a lamp on the kitchen table
On this winter night, my eight-year-old grandmother
Standing beside him and to his right in a white cotton dress,
A braid draping her shoulder, holding with her left hand
The back of the wooden chair that they’ve lugged outside
From the kitchen for him, smiling at the camera
With more warmth and pleasure than any of us ever knew her
In person to express, proud of the grisly old war veteran
With the long beard, the dark wool pants, the gaunt
Expression, and the dark wool coat he wears in spite of summer,
With his long legs crossed at the knee, and his hands
Hinged in his lap at the knuckles, likely still suffering
From ailments he’s endured since the war, including
The chronic rheumatism that he apparently incurred
On the cold march away from the most important of several
Relatively minor Civil War battles waged in Kentucky,
And the injury to his groin, at that same Battle of Perryville,
On October 8, 1863, that one unintentionally funny
Sentence or another describes in handwritten testimony
In the space provided on the bureaucratic form
To suggest that a splinter of hickory from a split rail fence
Found its true destiny there when a rail was shattered
By a Confederate cannonball fired in his direction—ailments
I know about from reading the photocopied disability reports
That fell all around me like autumn leaves from a broadleaf tree
With photographs like the one I’m holding up to the light
When my history-buff mother died and left them all to me.

Scott Ruescher’s 2017 book of poems, Waiting for the Light to Change, published by Prolific Press, includes poems that appeared in AGNI, The Common Ground Review, Solstice, Ploughshares, The Naugatuck River Review, and elsewhere, and others that won annual prizes from Able Muse, Poetry Quarterly, and the New England Poetry Club. His new poems have been appearing in About Place, The Tower Journal, The Evening Street Review, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. He administered the Arts in Education program at Harvard Graduate School of Education and taught in the Boston University Prison Education Program for many years.