2010 2-Day Contest Winners

The winners are:

First Place - Paris Sea - Early morning, PMO

Second Place - Gabe Foreman - Fall Guys 

Third Place - Jim Nason - Market

Honourable Mention - Jaun Harrow - In April

Honourable Mention - Karen P. Ouellette - Cornetto

Honourable Mention - Dethe Elza - Untitled

Congratulations!

The 10 words from the 2010 contest

 

First Place

Paris Sea

Early morning, PMO

 

Hansard, bound in the dead of night, arrives.

 

Lay the debate open on the table.

Leaf through, take in the gore of question period,

petitions splayed, begging attention like porn or Maclean’s magazine.

Practise self-denial.

 

Underscore each foible of the opposition including

your own backbenchers run amok

cabinet ministers slipping their collars

forthcoming civil servants

reporters immune to spin.

 

Mark the impending 4th anniversary of

Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean

with a solemn X and an asterisk

* deadline to appoint my own man.

 

Eat grit with some greens for breakfast.

Cut up a bloc of cheddar, mild as the NDP.

Slake your thirst for deficit spending with some domestic 

sparkling wine and celebratory cuts

to the CBC.

 

Tune into CPAC.

 

Watch the culture slowly grow

not spindly and wan, but

resistant as dandelions, prairie fires, like 

the exaggerations on lobbyists’ CV’s

too numerous to counter.

 

It was easier to etiolate democracy.

That took but a note to the Governor General,

a prorogation, or two.

 

Admit she came in handy that way.

 

Second Place

Gabe Foreman

Fall Guys

 

Despite their common name, scapegoats

are seen in the spring and summer.

 

Take note: the fact that you got dumped

on your anniversary means nothing to the Mounties

kicking down your office door. Life is never fair.

When your office door implodes, no one's there.

 

You’re a white-collar criminal on the lam, a torn leaf,

plus your pants are short, making you look solemn,

autumnal, too old to unwind at the nautical motel.

On your bedside table, the grit from a cigarillo

mars the glossy cover of Fortune magazine.

On the mattress, turned down sheets reveal a sandbar

of fuchsia sailboats, moon-blue anchors.

 

Some senior partners had remarked from the start

how you seemed bound to bring trouble to their business.

Dead air piled up on you for a November of reasons.

Crops to a criminal mastermind, fall guys etiolate,

wither and slake the Creator’s thirst for the worst

in hide-outs at the nautical motel.

 

Their lips tongues and teeth are celestial refugees

embedded in the rubble of a sensual war

 

Third Place

Jim Nason

Market

 

Air redolent with herb.

Marrow bone, leg of lamb, tenderloin

bound with red string. Travel makes you wise—

tomorrow I fly, but today, labyrinth of stalls,

June through cracks in wood-beam ceiling,

gold-glass shadows trampled under hurried feet.

Talking, tasting, people pushing past; sawdust, road

grit carried in from street. Harlan, the Egg Man, died

November eleven, a solemn day made sober by

handwritten note: Seven months Anniversary

of passing. Sixty-two years his fold-out table,

his pyramid of yolks, this frown-face photo torn

from grease-stained magazine. Deli-pink salmon, silver

sardines. Vinyl tablecloth: red rose, green leaf—long trays

of cupcakes and cookies. Barrel of coffee.  Case of loose

black tea. Mango, grape, orange juice in cooler to slake

heat-wave thirst, but does not console against this shoving.

I know the names of merchants, their far-fetched stories.

Hermes, the fish guy, from the Danforth, and before that,

Mytilene. “No trout today?” he asks. “No tilapia or tuna?”

Tight-lid barrels etiolate dry oats. Young man at cash,

world-weary, indifferent to my small purchase of green apples.

Tomorrow no parcels or World Famous Pea Meal, no grey bin

heaped with entrails from Seafront Fish. Tomorrow is spice

market, feta and olives, religion mixed with politics. Adieu brick

and concrete, oranges in crates, crisp red grapes, overflowing

barrels. Farewell hog-town brick; soup-bone and flies; pig

hocks on silver hook. Tomorrow, unbound, unwound,

ample wax wings to Crete.

 

Honourable Mention

Jaun Harrow

In April

 

This season, this month

you worry about papers, exams.

You analyze Wordsworth and Byron

and tell me this morning with a voice so solemn

that they both died in April.

Not a note from an Aeolian harp

but the of gurgle of the coffee pot

heralds this proclamation.

Today you document April as the anniversary of dead poets

while I revel in my gardening magazine,

seed catalogues spread across the kitchen table.

 

My poetry is Kroetsch not Keats—

the measure of the quarter section

bound by barbed wire

rewritten by the plow.

Not the prim order of the English garden

my labyrinth is of lilacs

my thorns of caragana.

No sham ruins but the rusted husk of an old John Deere.

No nightingales but magpies

who slake their hunger on roadside gopher guts.

 

Come to the garden with me and feel

the grit beneath your nails

damp dirt upon your skin.

Dig in with your scholar’s hands

where feeble sprouts etiolate

under autumn’s ode of decomposing leaves,

where poetry gnaws at the lingering edge of graveled snow—

new bud not yet in leaf

straining to the unseen sun.

 

Honourable Mention

Karen P. Ouellette

Cornetto

 

In the monthly magazine,

you are bound for glory,

standing tall, antiquated,

your lean body

legendary,

 -a solemn note

of wood and wind…

anniversary time,

from the grit of a summer stage,

breath centered

on evening’s ensemble,

you etiolate

then bow gentle

 -a lost lover,

a long leaf free-floating;

from a table of notes

that slow rise before us,

you slake

your solemn sadness

into Renaissance movements

 -a passion that sky-drifts

winged creatures

 -soft-veiled lovers,

where ancient sounds

pulse precious;

leap wistfully

above the grey gauze cloud …

a poignant celebration,

Cornetto,

bending bone and air

on perfumed breeze.

 

The ten 2010 2-Day Poem Contest words were:

1. grit	2. bound	3. anniversary	4. table	5. note
6. leaf	7. etiolate	8. magazine	9. slake	10. solemn