2009 2-Day Contest Winners

The winners are:

First place - Rebecca Ellis

Second place - Amy L. White

Third place - Toni Van Deusen

Read the winning poems below. Honourable mentions are included.

First Place

Rebecca Ellis

Proof of an Afterlife

In the graveyard at Ottawa, Illinois,
Geiger-counters detect the afterlife. Here
and all across town in landfills the white dust
of radioactive radium and zinc sulfide – 
kissed by the sweet red lips of factory girls
and painted onto one tiny watch dial after another –
waits out the tick-tick-tick of its 1600-year half-life.

The girls twirled their paintbrush tips
between their lips, as instructed, drawing
precise outlines for the miniature numbers – 8 and 6
some of the most difficult – and pulled the brushes
deftly down the sides of the numerals, erasing
excess paint and on the next twirl of the brush,
swallowing it. See, it’s harmless, said the supervisors.
No odor, no taste, no noxious fumes!
Each number was exact, the lines
hard-edged, no gradation.  No time to improvise
over a mistake – precision was everything. 
                                                              At night
after lights out, in the bathroom mirror, the girls
could see the brilliant freak show – thrilling! –
of their teeth glowing in the dark.

“Undark,” it was called, or “Luna” –
the beautiful names for radioluminescent paint,
its glow-in-the-dark lure soon found everywhere:
Westclox alarm clock faces, doorbells, bedroom slipper buttons,
the eyes of dolls and toy animals, even theater seat numbers.
US army watches shined all night into the dreams of new soldiers.

There were stories that in Switzerland,
even under a wire-thin crescent moon, young girls’ hair sparkled
and sparked at night, flashing effervescent as a halo.  But in Ottawa
the angels fell apart, their teeth coming loose in handfuls, bones
crumbling overnight, dead before morning.

No more parlour games, no kisses, never anybody’s sweetie
or kumquat after that – a small settlement after the legal quagmire
and now they sink down, year after year, into the boneyard where
new teenagers thrill themselves by walking
over the graves at night, the mechanical tick of Geiger-counters
proving, beyond the rumors, that the dead
are with us, and never go away.

Second Place

Amy L. White

Painting in the Tropics, 2009

No fish, this time, no fish.
Find a fresh canvas and rack it up. Then paint, you old fool, paint.

Time edges forward, slow bead on bead.
He's all brute force and need, like a novice,
Blind to each gradation.

Understudies in the parlour, lauded exhibitions -
Who'd expect this scene? Dirty palette
the stump of his shaking arm,
he wounds the cadmium, dulls the emerald green.

Somewhere he offended, and imagery
Once effervescent
stiffened on the floor.
Now loud-leafed plants reach through the window,
rubbernecking at the gore:
kumquat viscera, stopping up the sink,
and half-hearted daubs of paint, half-squeezed tubes of ink.

The canvas leers, a gap-toothed freak in the foliage of unwashed rooms.
Old master with the noxious breath still looms,
Whispering, Let go, be agile, improvise!
Such lies. He takes a pull and tells himself,
Relax, old man, just dial it in.

Something flits by. Was it a fin? No matter.
The quagmire shifts, he flexes the vermilion
and his brush finds solid ground.

Now cobalt, tempered, for they are thrashing.
Titanium buff for the glint of eyes,
And the gills, viridian, gasping.

Third Place

Toni Van Deusen

Station

When the piano arrived, suddenly
what had been simply our front room
became the parlour. The old Hamilton
gave my mother a sense of elegance missing

from her hard-scrabble pre-piano life.
She carried in her mind a kind of ruler, each mark
a gradation of class, white trash at the bottom,
a sorry lot stuck in a genetic quagmire.

The piano raised us from our sink of working class
almost to gentry, a step which required new clothes,
white gloves and spectator pumps,
bought at W.T. Grant’s and laid away

in a tissue-lined drawer with great ceremony,
never worn. New dresses, shirtwaists of the sort
she imagined a doctor’s wife might wear,
she had to improvise, her Singer clacking away

on Saturday afternoons, dial set to WLS and Milton Cross,
the Philco’s tubes glowing kumquat yellow
in the dim light of the hallway. Looking back
it seems to me that was when the rot set in,

my mother’s desire to climb into the middle class
a noxious effervescent gas emanating from the piano,
a piano only I could play, a barefoot snot-nosed child
playing Für Elise, a freak, like a pig in church.

Honourable Mention

Veryan Haysom

Writing, after heavy spring rain

These are markers on the dial of the seasons:
Armloads of winter wood & hours
beside the kumquat coals
of the parlour stove;
buckets of ash that leach sweetness –
noxious to potato, blueberry & rhododendron –
into this valley, this sink into swamp;
an apple tree pulled by a rose to earth
in a quagmire of leaf-mould, rose wand & re-rooted thorn;
effervescent pink & violet in blackberry, rose, birch & alder;
& the freak of a squirrel in the barn at the dog’s entry.

Stream, chickadee, sparrow & crow improvise a chord –
a gradation of joy in overlapping sound – noted
on the screen that is this cloister’s window.

Honourable Mention

Myna Wallin

Dinner Theatre

1.

I played Chopin on our grand piano,
languid legato, my mother suffering from radiation poisoning
that burned both the noxious malignancy
and her rage.
We had lived a kitchen sink drama in our
mansion on the hill.
But the set was pure Ibsen.

I was the freak in high school that ran crying
from band practice,
or French class. Ran home to make sure my mother
was still breathing.

Is there anything I can do,
my teacher pleaded so quietly, through dense fog,
as though someone had turned a dial,
the sound down, the picture out of focus,
all kinds of dials meant to be on—
off/ off/ off.

When my mother fell into a coma they
kept me from visiting her. It was melodrama now.
I had no idea what coma meant,
it was just a word after all,
and with no precedent in real life,
imagined her floating, astral travelling—
a gradation of death, (de)gradation of life into something
that wasn’t life anymore

2.

All too soon, the porcelain teacup collection
that had quivered at her rage, sat calmly,
waiting for a civilized tea to be set in the parlour.
Guests had come to pay their respects
for she had always been an effervescent hostess.
And they knew nothing of the quagmire of hostility
that had held us all hostages for all those years.

What I remember of the Shiva is seas of tea
and every description of cake, kumquat preserves on
scones, clotted cream;
for seven days and seven nights we stuffed ourselves
with sweets, while everyone cried
and the bit players tried their best to improvise:
Is there anything I can do?

Honourable Mention

Jessica Michalofsky

Damage Deposit

My Rumi, your Yeats. You back the threadbare furniture out the parlour door. I don’t help. In the kitchen, water unboils; effervescent dust motes float above the white stove. A tumbler of kumquat preserves coagulates on the window sill. Noxious cleaners tumble from under the kitchen sink, freed; the dust pan stands awkwardly against the wall. A quagmire of plastic bags unbind themselves and launch onto the floor. A gradation of stains on the white counter is unprinted by the sponge with bits of egg clinging to it. Toast crumb and coffee grain confetti disperses behind the appliances. Stray pennies left on the floor remind how we improvise. The freak fortune of our meeting coalesces with the closing of the door. Turning back, the hands on the dial stand up straight, embrace as if they loved.

mail on the table
addressed to no one we know
cup we found outside