2011 2-Day Poem Contest winners

First Place - Amanda Baker-Patterson - New Old Place

Second Place - Andrea Fraser - the colony

Third Place - Frances Boyle - Alice Underground

First Honourable Mention - Maxine Hayden - Breast Reduction

Second Honourable Mention - P.S. Cottier - Cockatoos

Third Honourable Mention - Heidi Garnett - The Angle of Repose

The 10 words for 2011

 

First Place

Amanda Baker-Patterson

New Old Place

We move into a 90-year-old building
on top of Seattle’s steepest hill.
Cascade of pavement breaking onto
Mercer Street, wet palm of the city.
This reminds me of Rosemary’s Baby, I say,
adding, after you recoil, in a good way.
Slender bone of railing rattles up the stairway,
carved glass doorknobs and faucet claws whose
squeaking twists seem to wind back time.
I finger the ragged ends of my hair,
think of clipping it short like Mia Farrow’s
or like my sister’s.

We push furniture into rote patterns turned
fresh constellations inside these walls and
their leaden secrets pressed between layers of paint.
The view of jewelled harbour breathing ferries in and out
makes up for patches of pale rot that
mar the floorboards, the vascular ripples
spread across the bedroom ceiling.
We quibble over the order of books on shelves,
Atwood nestled against Burroughs,
Nabokov’s eyes, black and white and skeptical,
peering out from one thick spine.

Duct tape slashed, the last
derelict box labelled “MISC.” unpacked.
You cradle your guitar, strum tenderly,
steady treacle of music a test
for damage from the truck
while I realign mugs in cupboards,
get compulsive about the evenness
of gaps between chairs.
Thousands of miles from our real homes,
we revel in these small comforts.

Hard part’s over, you say,
eyes closed as we clutch tired hands,
but I bleed consciousness
slowly, uncertain of sleep in this new old place,
threatened by the ease of your descent.
Below us, a bus filters through the city,
passengerless save for an umbrella,
a going-away gift from your mother,
that slides and shudders with each turn of the vessel,
its bright nylon collapsed, forgotten,
still damp from the rain.

 

Second Place

Andrea Fraser

the colony
china doll in full fatigues
splayed across the jungle floor

yellowed curls quibble against lex naturalis
encroaching vegetation
moist and fertile
eager to take root
entwine her fractured skull
sprout across the anvil of the land
fling whispers to the wind
pollinate the revolution!

china doll sleeps, hands in fists
beneath the umbrella of a cocoa tree

ant battalions cascade down climbing vines
lockstep, compulsive
mindlessly marching rote formations
flank treacle lips painted rafflesia red
tiny boots mar her porcelain bone 
reclaim the space
save this place
drill her body back into the earth

 

Third Place

Frances Boyle

Alice Underground

Night-blind she fingers the rosary, wraps it round,
mumbles prayers by rote.  Only the feel of the beads
slipping through fingers, knots to climb. Railing to cling to
as stairs wind steep. Her friends urge her forward, down,
loosely grip elbows to wing-tip angles to save her
from uncertainty.  Footing scuffs rough on oozy cave floor,
kicked pebbles rattle.  Worries niggle and quibble.
Fear dampening her hair, her lips peel back to a rictus grin.
Fish skeleton preserved on cave walls, flat like a leaf.
Grey green ice masquerading as stone.  Or bone.

Quiver of ancient cold in her gut, but on her skin
the air is sulphurous windigo-breath. Stone world
cave emulsive.  Cave visions, an eye within a sleep.
Alice underground, no dream of fairy cakes, treacle tarts
as she falls.  Feel her cascade down the nightmare spin
to a stop.  Limestone sandwiched below surface, obsessive
compulsive dis-ordering,  Calcified, convulsive ice
growing, lurking.  Drips jerky in faint light, cave eyes.
Words bounce off their own echoes.  Her pulse impels
motion, compels flight from the lingering clammy touch.

Steps further, cool ribbons ruche the midnight shroud,
mar its greasy oilcloth sheen.  Chimney-drawn air
opens vaster caverns in the dimness.  Stalactites,
stalagmites gleam graceful.  Paradoxical helictites twine
sideways.  She breathes air-borne nursery tales – a nanny
aloft with parrot-handled umbrella, a bear (tut-tut)
on a balloon, a web word-woven in the breeze,
ships, carpets, beds that flew.  She inhales a split second
helping of equilibrium.  New springs begin to trickle,
flow.  She draws sweet stuff from the wonderland well.

 

First Honourable Mention

Maxine Hayden

Breast Reduction

Beep beep beep beep the regular heart beat.
Whoosh, ventilator for every breath.
Acrid smelling blue paper drapes cover her face and head like an umbrella,
Lay along both sides of the torso cascade over abdomen and legs.
Expose collar bone to navel, personality concealed,
An operative site.

Stretch the areola, sterile marker, outline a cookie cutter circle.
Stretch the skin, malleable sterile ruler, measure check compulsive remeasure.
Compare lateral to medial, right to left.  Delicately draw the reduction pattern.
Purple ink lines mar the mounded silent flesh.

“15 blade.”
Score the top layer of skin, precise pressure known by rote, reveal white dermis.
De-epitheli-ize:  skin off the epidermis, pinpricks of blood seep up,
Leave the precious subdermal plexus of veins intact, the nipple’s drainage system.
Allow blood flow out.  Save the nipple.
Leeches in reserve for post-op use if veins grossly engorged.
Keep the nipple alive.

“10 blade.”
Deep pressure with steel through dermis, lay the flesh open,
Bulging yellow fat, islets of streaky white true breast tissue.
Thick red liquid wells.
“Sponge . . . Forceps . . . Burn.”
Touch cautery to forceps, electric current sizzles, minute puff of smoke.

Use cautery to cut, superheated fat falls apart, suction plume with a miniature wind.
Ignore the burnt smell.  Pass off excised tissue.
Maintain a rich arterial pedicle for blood supply to the nipple.
Blood flow in.  Save the nipple.
Hemostasis as we go, burn each oozing vessel.
Sculpt shape size trim compare.
Art judgement experience training creativity.

“3-0 monocryl.  We’re closing.”
A small curved needle, fine colourless suture difficult to see without practice.
Forceps hold tissue, needle driver glides the point through.
Petit pas de deux: rotate wrist, draw thread, tie a square knot,
Economy of movement, hands in synchronous motion around each other,
Come together, move apart.
Each meticulous bite reveals more of the soft final shape,
Pleasure to sew gaping tissue, create a new structure.

“4-0 monocryl.”
Finer suture to finish, as thick as a long straight coarse hair.
Run a continuous subcuticular stitch, back and across, tension just right.
The wound a thin line with no visible stitches.

Satisfaction in symmetry.  Archetypical form, pink healthy nipples.
A pound of flesh?  Two pounds less to carry,
No quibble she will be pleased with her new shape, ease on her neck and back.
Wash away the dried and clotted blood, gently place stark white dressings.
A modern treacle.

 

Second Honourable Mention

P.S. Cottier

Cockatoos

Yes, we've heard their sad repetitions,
the 'pieces of eight', the rote 'Pretty boys',
dropped from tired beaks like peanut shells;
birds bored far beyond the thinning bone.
Compulsive as a handwasher who never
satisfies herself against germy armies
(save her hands are gloved in blood,
and cleansed into gauntlets of agony)
the caged bird will repeat this or that,
sigh, then hear that weird word clever,
thrown at his misery like a charity coin,
a beggar at our table of meaning.

But to see them treed, hanging upside-down,
greeting wet wind like a blown umbrella,
yellow winking at sun like a wicked punch-line,
raucous joy a cascade of brassy cunning sax;
this is the true sound of this bossy bright thing.
Why quibble about what they know, or don't?
A screech floats to ground like a metal bird,
cut with tin-shears by a half-blind drunk,
so gratingly loud that ears are near-shorn.
Cockatoos mar the sky with jagged freedom,
as far from a nightingale's sweet treacle
as a sudden mouthful of shattered glass.

 

Third Honourable Mention

Heidi Garnett

The Angle of Repose

Unlike the western slopes and save for the Thompson River,
the northernmost edge of the Cascade Mountain Range
is dry and compulsive.  You climb through Engelmann Spruce
and Ponderosa Pine until you break through to a different kind of seeing,
an emptiness in the mind like an umbrella flipped onto its head.  Today,
other than two gray jays who quibble about the price of pine nuts,
there’s no one in sight to mar the stillness.
                                                    At this height
everything, including sound, begins to thin,
the soil, the air, the trees,
but, there, a stand of Larch, would-be saints
quoting scripture from rote memory and whipping themselves
with needled branches, exposing the soft heartwood, the treacle flesh.

Teach me how to pray.
Teach to believe what the dead say.
I want to hear a voice say Maybe when I ask.

You leave the marked trail and clamber over a scree slope,
faith’s angle of repose.  The path
just instinct now, a lake drawn on a map, rock overgrown with lichen:
              Hooded Bone, Devil’s Matchstick, Sulphur Stubble.

Here, wind is a moving meditation, a listening
hollow as a cave dug into the hillside of memory
and memory beaked and raven-tongued.
You hear it cawing at your back, but don’t turn around.
You’ve already left the trees behind and are becoming unbranched,
leafless, the blackened stump of a fire that burned itself out
years ago.  Higher up, something hears its name called
and wakes from a long dreamless sleep.  It stretches
and rises from its hard bier,
near-sighted and hungry.

The ten 2011 2-Day Poem Contest words were:

1. rote	2. compulsive	3. umbrella	4. bone	5. mar
6. treacle	7. save	8. wind	9. cascade	10. quibble