“A Poem Before We Face the Business of Death”
On Monday across eight thousand miles,
you and I hash the weathers of the week,
the news, the pains and thoughts of this time;
you thank me for calling
and I thank you for my life and yours,
sweet saucy lipsticked and storied, you tiny mother,
carrying the daily load of your panic with peaceful hands.
I take up the refusal of your cooking, the facts
of your good health and mine, notching each laugh
of yours on an invisible totem pole.
This is about looking at you and bowing with every breath.
This is about returning every one of your terrors, unwanted.
About your hatred of genealogy, when
you and I make one such thorough line.
You third girl, undesired, born after
the irreplaceable dead boy, the prodigal
never coming back from pneumonia and silence.
Your green eyes turning the skyblue
that trumpets cataracts. The way, when I visit,
I pick up the small lint of things
that you no longer see. This is about your right
to cry to dubbed reruns of La Familia Ingalls,
the things that are sacred to you,
sacred to God, the male one,
and his winged minions. This is about you and me
living like newborns, small animals
who have known captivity and escaped. Over the phone
I hear the police sirens of our Buenos Aires
and tell you about the robins crowding my woods.
I shall inherit every age spot of your arms,
all the yellow that time brands on your skin,
the silver peeking stubborn through your blonde hair,
you who leave such treasure. Open handed you go
to kiss the beggars and buy from the poorest peddler.
Despite the miles, I go behind you, touching
my forehead to the cobblestones you tread.
Lorraine Healy
“Rich in sensual, potent imagery, this poem beats with a heart big as all the mountains of Argentina. A tribute to the speaker’s ‘sweet saucy lipsticked and storied...tiny mother,’ ‘Poem Before We Face the Business of Death’ is a gift to its readers. May it find its way to many, many grateful eyes and ears.”—Judge Paulann Petersen
Lorraine Healy is an Argentine poet and photographer living on Whidbey Island, Washington. She has an MFA in poetry from New England College, New Hampshire. She is published in The Seattle Review, Kimera, Puerto del Sol, the Rio Grande Review, Concrete Wolf, and CALYX Journal. She has two chapbooks: The Farthest South (New American Press) and The Archipelago (Finishing Line Press, 2007).
2007 LOIS CRANSTON MEMORIAL POETRY PRIZE FINALISTS
It opens like a magnolia
Behind the ribcage. One time,
Pissarro’s “Red Roofs”
At the D’Orsay in Paris.
You may be
On your way elsewhere
When something stops you. Or,
Standing knee-deep in the weeds
Of your own thoughts,
It won’t let you breathe.
You close your eyes to hold it in,
To keep from igniting.
A room in a magazine.
Is it the risky pink sofa?
The blue sandals
On the floor next to the shopping bag?
Once, in a city street
An oboe.
A stranger.
The sharp center
Around which the world whirls.
Not steadfast. But now.
Like a roman candle in April,
It does not fit.
What stands up to no law
But itself, has nothing to do
With anything but the air between.
It can destroy your life.
It brushes its petals on your neck
And is gone.
Phyllis K. Collier
“This poem opens itself ‘like a magnolia/ Behind the ribcage’ as it spills its striking images down the page.”—Judge Paulann Petersen
Phyllis K. Collier’s book of poems Cain’s Daughters was published by Blue Unicorn Press in 2005. Her poetry has won several awards, including an NEA fellowship grant, a Nimrod Pablo Neruda award, a Willow Springs award, National Writers Union award, and the Yeats Club Award of Merit. She has a Master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Washington. She also worked for many years as a technical writer at Boeing and at Microsoft, wrote feature articles for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and taught composition at North Seattle Community College.
* * * * *
“Docking at Limnos”
for Chris
I know you must feel the body of your island that I passed
so often, the whole of your past in its rocky terrain,
its persistent sea, the sound of its letters on my lips,
Λ?μ-νοσ, pressed and then open, tongue on the roof
of my mouth, the hiss of the sigma like the spray
from that last wave that plays over it.
How can we not be kindred, rooted to the soil of sand
and retreat? It still holds me, moored to it.
That is why our own bodies re-pose while our speech
connects and we travel quickly, as though space
were just a land escape. The last stop on the ferry, hour
of pre-dawn, of restful somnolence—
though I heard the call to port, I felt the ferry
slow in its way to dock while I lay in the hold
of a vessel and the motion of the sea that contained it.
I didn’t know yet that this was your homeland,
volcanic gold and honey. Instead, I was focused on the need
to sleep, knowing that the day ahead would require all
of my attention, the sun pulling up as we docked, the mountains
luring us with crisp lookouts and the overwhelming
scent of pine, with cliffs goats traversed, with farmers on donkeys
on high-altitude roads. Where were the women
who had lit the roadside icons? Why do we always
slow on seeing them, as if wanting to be blessed?
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee
“With strong, long lines, this poem’s music takes us along on its journey, leading us to the evocative questions with which it ends.”—Judge Paulann Petersen
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s book, On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), is the winner of the Seventh Annual Gival Press Poetry Award. The collection received a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary and scholarly journals, including CALYX Journal, Feminist Studies, The Massachusetts Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Currently a resident of New Jersey, Donna lived in Greece for many years.
* * * * *
Nameless enormous One, come.
But come
small. Come
into this sunlit dishwater kitchen
weightless as the light
slanting across the scattered newspapers.
Come silent
as thought and that powerful. Come
gradual as grass cracking the sidewalk.
But come
bright as birds at the feeder,
red miracle of flight. Come
like You came to our ancestors
who could hear the stars click on
because they believed, no, knew
stars were their cousins. You
came, came
because they prayed. Come.
“Music knits this compelling prayer together: a music that draws the reader into the poem with steady, resonant power.”—Judge Paulann Petersen
Judith Tate O’Brien’s collection, Mythic Places, won the ByLine Press 2000 Chapbook contest and the Oklahoma Book Award. By the Grace of Ghosts, a collection co-written with poet Jane Taylor, was published in 2003 by Village Books Press. Village Books Press also published Everything That Is, Is Connected in 2005, a finalist in Oklahoma for The Book Award. Single poems have been published in journals including CALYX Journal, Poet Lore, and Hubbub.
* * * * *
After Louise Clifton's "Homage to my Hips"
Was
The sound of a cricket’s
thirst for dew, the creases
of young leaves and sepals,
rooted in adverbs–separately.
Were
ambiguous folds,
anther and stigma
like a tea cup
in the grooves of a saucer.
Is
held within the hips’
calyx, the quiet parts,
pleated pink metaphors,
carpel of longing.
Am
stamen and style,
unfolding sepals
and bleeding pollen,
the fruit, ripe.
Suzanne Roberts
“Using vibrant, short lines, this poem’s unusual architecture offers us the rich lexicon of its sensual imagery.”—Judge Paulann Petersen
Suzanne Roberts is the author of two collections of poetry, Shameless (Cherry Grove Collections, 2007) and Nothing to You (Pecan Grove Press, 2008). Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals, including Smartish Pace, Gulf Stream, Spillway, Eclipse, The MacGuffin, and ZYZZYVA. She lives, writes, and teaches in South Lake Tahoe, California.
* * * * *
—this boy I am remembering
put his eyes on me
he stepped out
of his body, let it
pool around his ankles like
a lagoon
and he put his eyes
on me and they were shame-
less—less accusation than
allegation
and I must have looked like an icon
or a criminal statute
or a meal of Texas
ale-and-steer and all of me:
arms, waist, shoulders and
their blades, butt & kneecaps
were suddenly bargain beauties
because of the tales they could tell
still, he didn’t take
his eyes away just let them unbend
then close me/open
while he inhaled
looked at my wrists & toes & any
other part of my biology he had
not yet oppressed—
and my flesh turned dark
as through it could speak:
don’t please
but he wasn’t finished—
Lynne Thompson
“This poem is one swift fall of quirky, sensuous turns that carry the reader along to leave her breathless and open at its end.”—Judge Paulann Petersen
Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the Perugia Press 2007 First Book Award and was published that September. Her other publications include two chapbooks, We Arrive by Accumulation (SeaMoon Press, 2002) and Through a Window (Conflux Press, 2005), and she has poems forthcoming in the Southeast Review, Runes, and Poem, Memoir, Story (PMS). Thompson holds a BA from Scripps College and a JD from Southwestern University School of Law and is currently employed as the Director of Employee and Labor Relations at UCLA.