2017 Open Competition Results

Glaciarium

…it has been surmised that there was a time when the circumpolar ice extended far into the temperate zone –
Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)

From here as you skate you can look at the Alps,

backdrop to your catch-foot, your spread eagle;

as you jump over your hat you can glimpse

the tree-line of larches above your bare head,

the balustrade of players who scrape out

a polka with chilblained fingers, a fine steam

beading their velveteen cuffs. Behind the walls

and high passes, always half in towering shade,

are other objects your eye cannot follow,

the way being blocked by sundogs or a stranger

who when you wake is your own phantom-self

thrown by the sky across a mountain of cloud.

This is the year the earth has suddenly grown

so much older than anyone had counted on,

its genealogies inscribed in fossiliferous rock,

its archives deep-frozen in glacial spillways

where only frost-flowers bloom. But today

is the day when the ice-maker fails, you lose

your footing as the cosmos tilts and the rink

runs ruinedly into its constituent fluids.

You can’t see yet what’s coming over the hill,

hurtling towards you from way before Genesis:

an alp-man riding the flood-tide with a gutful

of deer-meat inside him, his skin-leather leaking

unstoppable secrets. In your sleep you’re still

skating, endlessly tracing a figure of eight

through the deepest of winters – now or soon

with a small force throw your body forwards into light.

Fieldwork in Secret

All day in the heat they would talk. Some sang

even, though no one could hear the other’s

words through the grit and noise, the rusted

grind of machinery. But still they’d drive their

voices like fenceposts into the hard din of it,

not for a fence for keeping in some untamed

thing, but rather just the plain act of keeping.

As a boy, I used to cross the fields to watch

them at it, the sweat, their mouths moving as

practiced as their hands, shaping the steel dust,

the air – into what, I could never quite say.

A craft of some sort, of sound, of stale light.

Whenever my father came home he’d leave

the keys dangling in the pickup, a scum of grey

around the bath and, every now and then, her

(my mother, I mean), driving with me away

for days, weeks even, but we always came and

were taken back. I guess he liked the act of it,

leaving. I still remember him mumbling along

to the radio, but at home he never sang, not

to anyone, barely spoke in more than those

sentences he set out on the table, cruel little

heirlooms. My mother who spoke enough

for all of us told me how she eventually had

to ask him to stop saying he loved her, and so

he did, though as he neared the end she’d hear

him at night muttering the words and her name

over and over as though they were a kind of

work he’d done all his life and now his breath,

like his hands, was set to it. I could always tell

as he and I drove back that we were almost home

when, though we kept no cattle or horses,

the untended fields were scored with fences.

Domestic Poxes

A plague on your house,
& mold, too.
A few misaligned beams &

a colony
of carpenter ants, plus
a reading

of radon in the basement.
A sickness
laying low your sheetrock, a

cheapening
of your resale value due to
a rumor

of haunting, a threat of
eminent
domain. Paint warped, &

a stain
caused by rainstorms, a
compromised

foundation, a sump pump
rendered
ineffective. A trail of

invective
from jealous neighbors, a
color scheme

done in by a conspiracy
of painters,
by a clique of licensed

interior
decorators. A series of
tremors

culminating in disaster,
in pipes
set afire, in a web of

wrecked wires.
A pox on your house, & on
your yard, too,

on your neighborhood &
on every
godforsaken person

you ever knew.

Instructions to My Brothers by Giles Goodland

Collecting the Eggs by Cheryl Pearson

Cream by Mara Bergman

Excuse Letter #78 by Mariel Annarose Nicole L. Alonzo