2002 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize Award
Dog Days by Susan Elbe
July 5
In Utah, no one can sleep.
Millions of crickets five inches deep
trill like fevered schoolgirls
speaking in tongues. In New York,
tripped alarms slam the air.
Someone wrenches open a hydrant
and blistering streets sizzle with steam.
Here, the heat leaches you
of story and radiance.
Hard work, this
mucking through silence and sleep
so seamless no dream can unzip it,
not even an old ghost to tear at its threads
with long fingernails of memory.
July 20
This is how you want it—summer
forever, the sky, blue and lucent
as the moonstone of a baby’s eyes
and clean, white sheets
you lie down on at night
someone outside on his way home,
whistling an old tune—
See the pyramids along the Nile…
while you cross over
the wobbly bridge into sleep
and somewhere behind clouds,
the dog star drops off
the edge of this cockeyed earth.
August 1
This is how it is—at 2 a.m. still 80 degrees,
the sky murky with dank breath
and a lignin of heat cements you
to sweaty sheets. Fishy lake smell,
a carp moon belly-flopped in the sky.
Angled with shadow, the street
shifts like dream, turns a different face.
Stalling neon thips and fizzles, faded
to the hollow-heart pink of strawberries.
Toward morning, blue crackle,
then thunder, rain pattering in the leaves
like a small dog’s toenails on linoleum.
That dumb darling, your huge need,
lazy and bloated with heat, lies down
beside you, panting in its thick pelt of fur.
August 2
The cicadas and light this morning
rattle in the leaves like brass keys.
Last night’s rain trickles
from the eaves in long, silver strings.
Shucking sweet corn,
your fingers are slippery with silk.
Daddy-long-legs traipse in all the corners.
Already you see
how much starts to fall away
from the deep green, too-lush days
that prickle like stiff crinoline.
Imagine 20 years from now. Then,
with luck, 20 more. Loss is a dry well,
empty pocket. It needs filling.
August 5
Not yet dusk, not yet
the underwater-blue time,
but the brief half-hour after sunset
when you glow inside out,
your slow-finned heart leaping
clear of fear, worry, what holds it
to this fraught world.
You give the devil his due
each time you care too much
about what doesn’t matter.
Something dark unwinds,
snakes up into the windrowed light.
August 7
Nothing keeps in this weather. Tomatoes
wrinkle and split. Cucumbers soften
and snap beans rust. Salt won’t pour.
The first dream in weeks begins.
God asks me what I want.
I say I’m lonely. Give me a poem.
I’m hungry. Give me the moon.
I say nothing is enough. Let me live
forever this life that exhausts
and scares me witless, yet brings me
daily to my knees in thanks.
But God turns up the underside of a leaf
and there’s death, riding
like a soft cocoon along the vein.
Susan Elbe
Susan Elbe’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in CALYX Journal, The North American Review, Laurel Review, Ascent, Permafrost, Southern Poetry Review, Passages North, and Rattle, as well as in the anthology A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry (CALYX Books, 2002). Her chapbook Light Made from Nothing is forthcoming from Parallel Press (University of Wisconsin-Madison, General Library System, March 2003). She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and works as a Web Content Analyst in Madison.
2002 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize Finalist
Four Short Months by Jennifer Richter
Tall as men in the Mekong
the eastern saurus crane
lifted its long-necked cry
above the miles of mud
and river and died out
when gunfire shouted back.
By the time I went
the country was quiet
and I walked past piles
of bullet-pocked rubble.
I did not yet have
a child inside, and I walked
past Vietnam’s broken cities
to the beach and its radiant waves
that had washed the war away.
Now that I have in me
my boy, I’m thinking again
of the wreck. In Hue
I walked through walls that gaped
with tank-shaped holes.
He is only strong enough
to flutter inside me, fly a little
as he floats though in four
short months my body
won’t be enough to keep
my son alive. When I walk,
my rocking soothes him
to sleep. When I am still,
he wakes in me, the wings
return like flocks of
miraculous cranes.
My son can hear me
when I sing so I sing
loudly, for us both, of the cranes
glided back into peace
on their black flight feathers,
their blood-red heads the only
wound that stalks the shallows.
My son can also hear
me when I cry. History,
grow wings and pass him by.
Jennifer Richter
Jennifer Richter is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. She lives in Corvallis. Her poems are published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Carolina Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, and other national magazines.
2002 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize Finalist
On the Thanksgiving Morning My Grandson’s Born by Wendell Hawken
I’ve kept the clothes no body fits,
33 1/3 records no machine can play,
boxes full of god-knows-what from other lives.
Of course I’ll put today’s newspaper up there
with his mother’s one armed teddy bear,
finger paintings I had framed, the gerbil cage
and goldfish bowls, the fake fur purse
she held against her cheek for years.
He can read about the world when he came in:
the coffee shop in Beijing’s Forbidden City,
the canceled probe to Pluto,
1607 map that’s better than ceramic shards,
stains of human habitation, for finding what has vanished
on a bluff above the Kennebec in Maine.
I’ll put this paper in the chest beside the box
that holds my cousin Sally’s wedding dress
that came to me when Sally’s mother died.
It took me years to pull the light bulb by its string
and lift that dress box lid
on the lace gone limp and yellow
up there under ceiling panels stained with rain,
where you find your way by feel
around the stuff suspended there above our daily lives,
where air and light seep in
and goldfish swim in empty bowls
and you can hear the gerbils creak their wheel
at night, especially in the wind, while downstairs
over the refrigerator sit the empty canning jars.
Wendell Hawken
Wendell Hawken is a retired marketing executive living on a farm at the mouth of the Shennandoah Valley, where and her husband raise Hereford cattle. She wrote her first poem—an ode to her uterus—in 1991 lying in bed recovering from a hysterectomy. Her chapbook, Mother Tongue, was published by Argonne House Press. She has two children and one grandchild, Carter McKinstry White, who was born Thanksgiving day 2000.