2008 2-Day Contest Winners

The 2008 contest participants had 48 hours to come up with a poem using all ten of the following words: vessel, filament, proof, article, thorax, wrench, buckle, sienna, rattle and nervous.

1st Place - Katherine Lawrence

2nd Place - Maureen Scott Harris

3rd Place - Renée Griffiths

Read the winning poems below. Honourable mentions are included.

1st Place

Katherine Lawrence

This is for Richardson's Ground Squirrel

flickertail, picketpen, tawny burrowing pest
of the short grass prairie, crippler of horse & rider,
cattle bison ox; tractor disabler, axle wheel breaker,
you warrant a pardon, you & your winding tunnels,
underground hibernacula of leaf-lined nest chambers,
kin cluster, a female social order bonded by mothers
daughters aunts nieces, each of you in estrus
one afternoon once a year, the glorious efficiency of the small,
shiver & bite; claw scratch further courtship, attend
your own ripe fattening. Think of it -
earth buckle contraction, a hairless litter, the multiples of proof
as you move from chamber to food cache, feeding
on foraged grasses, seeds, insects: head thorax abdomen,
every coarse filament chewed fine as sienna dust
before you vessel back to your blind litter, a milk urn.
Let's swap: my prairie for yours, nervous rodent industry
instead of cranes, bulldozers, dynamite.
Wrench of envy, your subterranean mess nothing compared
to what we've done: drought rattle, soil toxic, songless skies.
To Richardson's ground squirrel an article
of pardon: Blessed creatures that see so poorly in the dim
light of dawn and dusk.

2nd Place

Maureen Scott Harris

Dear Elizabeth

Your letters have kept me company for weeks
but now I feel the wrench of parting, the book
about to end, and so I read more slowly, put
it down, rattle around aimlessly in my study.
Proof of my affection, this delay, in finishing.

How alive you are on the page, and how like
a vessel, this large book, containing glimpses
of your life, messy and confused as
a pebble beach. No detail too small you wrote,
and article by article you share the toucan,
the nervous cats, housekeeping, the heat.
There you are, practicing your “life-long
impersonation of an ordinary woman.”*

Lit by the filament of poetry, you didn’t buckle
under loss but made an art of it – Awful but
cheerful is carved on your gravestone,
your own words, there at your request.

Reading your letters I want to write back.
I’d send you this statement “The primary
function of the thorax is respiration” hoping
you’d turn it into a poem – one stanza
perhaps holding the sienna gleam of
a beetle making its slow way across
a wide leaf, rhythm laboured and chancy
as your own asthmatic breathing.

* Poet James Merrill spoke of Elizabeth Bishop’s "instinctive, modest, life-long impersonation of an ordinary woman."

3rd Place

Renée Griffiths

Road Conditions

january weather is agitated daily along
the four-oh-one. each nimbus vessel
pausing to think before sloughing
ice, rain, snow, hail.
this is one nervous system.

each passing article describes
the rising, the freezing
point punctured, and winds, not
content with tree branches,

rattle the burlington skyway, aiming
to wrench free cars that seem burned
to the road. these hearts of the cities,
exhausting all welcome,
skid, pile, buckle

like cancered chests, asphalt filling
each separate thorax, wedged solidly
between everything needed. the finest
filament sews while fumes seep

into the grand river. swelling like any
wound, waters paint the sleeping grass
sienna. but this muck is no proof
of spring. there is such desperation
in the lack of birds.

Honourable Mention

Amy Leah White

Where you came from

I made a crude vessel, a trough my sweetheart.
Shiny pigs, the knives went rooting in the muck of me.
Thorax divided neatly, they nudged aside intestines braided thick,
the way we do your hair.

You lay in the midst my precious, a moist sienna fist.
In your anger you unfurled to howl your proof.
Then the muscled map refolded, bulkier than before,
men took a ragged filament and closed the edges of your door.
And there's more. Jugs of blood my darling, the inner glue.
Skin cells fluttering and nervous signals that rattle down the spine.
Ears and nose - the cartilage of attraction - and piercings:
Unexpected routes inside.

Oh it's a messy job beloved, and a strange soft pocket
for a soul.

Atop it all, the seething brain my angel, where your face remains
the indefinite article of my affection. I wrench myself awake from dreams
you still coil within, safe as a tongue in its groove.
Ah but things slip away from us, love.
You’ll come to know. And careful, when you buckle girl
which way you roll.

Honourable Mention

Kate Flaherty

as a child

Poppa’s trinkets shudder
and rattle against the window-shelf pane
whenever one of the grans primes the pump outside:
an Alaskan fishnet float of glass, the old-fashioned
spun sugar cone with its fancy crest,
a camphor-smelling blue glass bottle,
tall and nervous on the sill.

Gramma calls him packrat,
the proof in bags in the shed—
yellowed curling papers, shiny photos
now sun-warmed into clumps,
the Nobel township article he never finished—
nails and hooks on the mudroom wall for
sun-bleached bones, a beaver jaw,
rusted horse-bit and buckle, a hole-y minnow net,
the burnt sienna of Georgian Bay sand.

We gasp at the tiny hummingbird nest,
spun of cobwebs and the filament of moth feelers,
light as the sad puff of pipe smoke
Rupert the trapper leaves behind when he visits
for permission to trap beaver, rabbit, lynx.
Poppa says no trappers, no ski-dos, no Hydro men
on my land. Period.

He can be stern as Baba Yaga, flying around
in her butter-churn at midnight past the bone gate.

He can be soft too—
lets me touch the viceroy butterfly still
alive on his cap—the velvet powder wings,
bumblebee thorax, piece-of-thread legs
poking around like antennae.

It tickles.

Even when Gramma says time for sparklers
I cannot wrench myself away …

The breath-beat open and close:
brown paper scrap then a butterfly
in a blink. Open close
open and off!

Well that’s that. Poppa’s big hands
on his knot knees help him up with a groan,
open the screen door to let it out,
offer me a half zebra-mussel shell
he found under his big chair—
vessel for my new treasures.

Honourable Mention 

Misty Elliot

chamelier
My proof of choice was moonshine
a fermented sugar that could parch every last hydrogen
pearl from the sky.
Lost to fire spirits, memory is porous,
earthenware,
the mind a kiln.

Beyond the dunes
are huts of adobe slumber,
muted rows of baked sienna
that will someday crumble, return to their origins.

The chamelier has retired,
tented by goatskin,
supine upon his nervous carpet
a village of fingers still alive within the tapestry.

I have never seen so many knots within a square inch.

Do not fear the spiders you have killed
he says today.
I revulse over the hairy thorax
crushed behind a feather-budded tamarisk tree.
Eight guilty mutilations, one for every leg
that crawls me into civilized panic.

Upon the ruminating dromedaries,
Garbo and Simoom,
we slow-step,
the Saharan floor pressed turmeric.
His few words are never arid but botanical,
vining lush through me.

The storm sand-mackles our eyes, saltating,
I wrench forward, reach for the rein.
Wishing for eyelashes camel-long,
he pulls me down from the humped saddle.
Desert talcum makes a rattle of the skull,
abrades the amygdala,
until every particular article finds its settling place.

He is a mirage-blue man, a free man,
wearing the ocean upon a scarf that seems to quench him.
He wraps it around my mouth and I drink.

The night becomes tungsten, a filament of want, of wattage
that can buckle you under and other.
With the jam of dates upon our fingers, and minted tongues
we steep a new devotion.

He calls me Tagine,
a vessel of nourishment,
for here love settles in the liver
and instead the land is jaundiced.

Within a moonshine we are knotted together, every square inch.