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| Winners of the 2009 Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest |
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| News/Features - Literature | |||||||||||
| Written by Administrator | |||||||||||
| Tuesday, 14 July 2009 15:43 | |||||||||||
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2009 marks Midwest Writing Center's 36th-annual Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest. This year Max Molleston, longtime contest administrator, passed the reins to local poet Kristin Abraham, author of Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus. Kristin reconfigured the contest to contain just two categories: regional and national. John McBride Second Place, National Contest Bettendorf, Iowa Fishing Lake Superior What they fish for changes as the light changes on water. More than whitefish, pickerel, salmon. There's a space in their mind where they die. They brick it up. They bricked it up a long time ago. Their lines are invisible, but not their lures. They love them the way misers, even when they must talk, count ceaselessly, they love them feathered or striped or making a silver curve that flashes at the slightest flick of the wrist. If they could send an eye out on a hook and return it to its socket, they would, if they could use the heart for bait, they might. There is something they have never caught, something that makes them stand there every evening, waiting, casting, reeling in. It's different every time. The water's different, the sky, the way a tern hangs in the air, or doesn't. What they will catch grows to fill in a lake they've never seen before- no road out or in. Kerry Ruef Third Place, National Contest Lyle, Washington Blink Each evening at the sun's downward drift, shadow-rivers rich among hills swell in every ravine, fold, draw, spill into plains and cities -erasing the day. Over and over the long night arrives, saturates the ground; twigs, mud, leaves fill my mouth, enter my blood. I blink. A blade of cloud crosses the sky- a line of chalk, illuminated. I take my morning lessons. From the edge of the world, like a crocus bulb in spring: a charged light, a tangent of possibility. Sara Burns Honorable Mention, National Contest Boulder, Colorado Overlap
3. cups line the cupboard. the door opens on the left. i want to know exactly what guilt is. 4. there was an earthquake in the midwest. people did not know what to do. instead of crouching in doorways they stayed right where they were. no one died, but everyone felt the earth shake. Catherine Rankovic First Place, Regional Contest Pacific, Missouri Apple Orchard Amid fallen apples, bruised, crushed into sauce, wormy, wounded, shaken loose, let down, unsalvaged, purchased by the earth, refused, voted down from the hard-muscled tree, you poke a stick into its canopy, to fill a weightless-as-a-lampshade basket. Wanting the topmost, the twinned, the most unreasonable, shoe-deep in sugar-meal, craning and working and hoping, you milk better branches indefinitely. Each apple wears a different dress, like a belief. The sourest apples sweeten your mouth, leave skins like bookmarks in your teeth. Kirsten Dierking Second Place, Regional Contest Arden Hills, Minnesota Bridge in Sunlight By the time the creek reaches this bridge it's almost the Mississippi, ready to slip through the swale of the country, down to the whales in the wide ocean, the flickering salty underworlds, while earlier today, seven people rode a rocket relentlessly into the slack of space. Freud believed happiness has diminishing returns, and so, I suppose, we leave the things that used to please us so much more than they please us now. After awhile I walk away from the sunlit bridge, the water quits the creek for the river, and only the astronauts, peering at earth from a dark distance are more in love with everything they've left behind. Alexander Lumans Third Place, Regional Contest Carbondale, Illinois Before and After the Recovery of Uncle Ari's Body A vacation, two weeks long : learning his taxidermy secrets and hunter's dreams Broken line of mallards in the lake : he's watched them grow Roadkill left idle in driveway : the phrase "box-turtle-flat" Warped hallway mirror : someone looks older and someone younger Pulled muscles : warnings not to go swimming at night among the reeds Aunt Thorie stops looking at your fingers : he says "You look terrible in black." A hat with a removable picture : he smiles with a Chinese man in the background His daytrip, with a friend, not you, one glass eye : who is the better buckshot? Cans of Blue Ribbon, as cold as quarry bottoms : one takes the bullet , in a blur Uncle Ari's rifle : more than water in a creek Uncle Ari's heart : more than water in the creek Line of cars, lights dimmed : the anchorman takes a moment of silence Living in his house, but for how long? : the only chestnut box closed The question of cigar smoke : his name on someone's mind A car key stabbed in the ground : a quiet joke, safety Stamps too dry to lick : finding real bees in the honeycomb Shoe sizes and oar-strokes shrink to nothing : age, the relative thing, some dry scotch Head inside the pillow speaking down : yesterday's sundial Footprints like wet leaves : someone knocking on the screen and not the door Granite deposits deeper than the heart : a cloud of unknowing Cancer of the barn's paint : chess moves by mail. Heath Garrett Luster Honorable Mention, Regional Contest St. Louis, Missouri Cherry Stem Knot The table of fog-eyed darlings perched corner stage, Fingering martini necks, Tongue-tying knots with cherry stems. Those girls are warm milk, wet silk. Hip-swivels carve woozy figure-eights to the bar. Sweeping larger with every click of a heel, Tired world of fresh-shorn thorns. Be dreaming, be drinking, be still. The rub of the low E blooming a rumble that Bursts blouse buttons, peels stockings With a polyester sizzle. Like a snare, like a sneer. Dripping with friction, Air like a bowl of cut fruit. I lay my thumb flat to the current, The stony churn of the moon moves In my right hand. Heath Garrett Luster Honorable Mention, Regional Contest St. Louis, Missouri I Will Come Back Someday And the days started hanging together In a city that was not my own, Not my meadow. Couldn't churn and swell opaque Like the mud-bellied river. Never burned for me like a hay-stack. This place holds its own charms, But I am stumbling like a drunk. Mercurial and out-of-sync. Pacing out the difference. A copy of myself in analog, A doppelganger kidnapped by the noise, Suffering the generation loss, Of existing in tandem. Walking the streets after storms, Searching for some indeterminate, Darkening star. The fields fell at my feet In a way that all this gray-link stone, This dull shapeless hum, never could. The pigeons have no idea. The difference between animals and humans Is money, and remembering sadness Overnight. But we both keep our ire like secrets, Like warm, round stones. I will come back someday. Your absence would grow tendrils, Coiling my tepid insides; scooping secrets from me And bearing me where they would.
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