2003 2-Day Contest Winners

1st Place - Todd Besant

2nd Place - Sylvia Legris

3rd Place - Melanie Cameron

4th Place - Alison Calder

 

Read the winning poems:

First place:

Todd Besant

Scenes from a Spiteful Business

I. Pressure

start in midair, say, on a plane
the change in your ears as you descend--the pressure--is the
weight of the air      it is laid out in the barometric formula, which is constant,
unerring, and explains, too, the freezing drizzle
that pelts the taxi's windows on the drive from the airport, the cabby
lamenting the goal-line fumble
that cost his team a spot in the final--they just couldn't
handle the pressure--you in the backseat, shivering, sour-breathed and damp,
wishing you'd brought an umbrella, whispering under your breath,
just drive, just shut up and drive

II. Force

it was once called the badger game      a man would meet a stranger in a coffee
shop and be offered an envelope of photographs--the man and a woman,
a woman and the man--this man's wife never need know, if certain timely
payments were made      your client wants nothing but an end, wishes to
pretend it's as tidy as cutting in on a couple dancing a saraband in Kario or some
other pulsing city      the man in question--his haircut and the knot in his tie both
too tight--says, there is no evidence to support that claim      treats you
like you're the boy who always spoils it for others but his eyes,
litmus blue ruins, confess he is a man who has lain in the wrong bed
for too      long the sheets still warm to the husband's palm

III. Release

you spend most of your work hours slouched in your car      a thermos of coffee,
a bottle to piss in, a camera on the passenger seat      your boredom is mute,
unlike your kitchen faucet, which complains in irregular beats
the ice in your glass does not work by inertia, it reaches out cold tendrils to
gather in the whiskey's heat, much as the mind collects memories      (ice is the
truest archive of the past--consider the soot and seeds at the heart of retreating
glaciers--we cannot beguile ice)      the bartender places a fresh tumbler in
front of you, looks at the man in the corner the      ice
clicks against your teeth
you left your offering on his table      later he will insist
     he was only seeking shelter

 

1st runner up:

Sylvia Legris

Dog-star on the brain

Barometric saraband: triple-time dance of the thermometer, heat palpitations.
You fumble for meaning in sweat & inevitability; damp sheets, inexhaustible sheep & sleep
is a backwards counting of cloven-hoofed creatures & mistakes. (Beguile the night
with a litany of un-shuteye woes & weather-done-wrong-bys . . . confess confess confess . . .)

Drought-resignation (litmus-inertia). A spin spin spin cycle of thermal blankets & hot wash
without water (every faucette tapped-dry and misspelled out of the picture).
A blight on the cursed calendar! A curse on those out-of-this-world dogs!

~~~
Unyielding heat. The sun is bloodhound-determined, a relentless badger. And you . . .
you've lost the will to refrigerate. The last cool shelter now more remote than Kairo (the sky
has stifled you with paradox & foreign spellings): Amygdala, amygdala . . .

The dogs above angry but you float indifference, a triple-time cloud of almond
& seashore. Brain-sultry; rain-watery sun. Amygdala, amygdala. A barometric saraband.

 

2nd runner up:

Melanie Cameron

If we stand together beside the lake…

If we stand together beside the lake
on a spring afternoon, the breeze
will hold out its many cool hands
to greet us. And if we lie
down, there, in the evening, our bodies
sheltered together in an open
shell of sand, the many skins
of the breeze will leave
our heat behind, seeking
to beguile
the lake with its return. This assurance, this fumble,

toward perfect
balance – barometric, if our pressing
into one another could be
measured. In each others’ arms, we
arrive – complete
inertia, complete rest. The deepest

twilight over the lake, purple –
as litmus, or purely as the blood
of lichen torn
from stone – brightens, fades, red, blue, depending,
dipping its edge into the water. Once

this lake flowed from itself into a river into a stream into a cistern into a curving faucet turned open by my hands, still and cupped to receive it, though my feet tapped out a 3/4 time, solo saraband, and I noted the absent fourth beat, the fourth season, which opens leaves, petals, stalks – all the declensions of Kairo. Now

just as we

cannot entice the badger into tasting hyacinth and mallow, along the lake’s shore, nor coax her in                to burrowing for shelter                above ground, you cannot keep me

from bending toward you like tall flowers in the lake’s breeze, keep me         from twisting our tangled roots         around my determined tongue, nor persuade me                to carve a hole, the shape                of my body into anyone                but you. Dancing

the slow saraband at lake’s edge in twilight, breeze gone
to caress the water’s skin, you are
the fourth beat, once
missing.
_____________________________

Note: In this text, Kairo is an ancient Greek word meaning opportunity, seasonable time, the appointed time, the right and proper time.

 

3rd runner up:

Alison Calder

the animals dream (1)

"What do geese dream of?
Of maize."
-Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

inside his salty shelter the badger smells himself.
he is the entombed pharaoh reading hieroglyphic dreams.
outside the snow piles up, inertia
fumbles at his door but cannot move the stones.
the pharaoh sleeps. he waits.
the river under Faucette's field drips slowly,
when will the cup be filled and tip
to wash him with its waters?
he yearns towards the quilted grubs,
their saucy saraband seductive as the call
from any Kairo market stall. their heat defies
the barometric pressure's drop. he is beguiled.
but now, through dark, roots grow, their ribs surround
his sleeping form. he groans, blunt-snouted,
noses at the nets that wrap him close,
his opiate stupor turning blue sky
to litmus red of poppies. he digs
his heavy head beneath his paws, cries out
for mother with her bursting teats.
he sobs. and now the river's dry, the ferryman
returns him to the shore. he curls into his claws,
growls once to hear his voice. I am, he dreams,
I am, I am, and then he sleeps again

 

Finalist

Kimmy Beach
He Used it to Button the Jacket

the day my stepfather cut his thumb
off, he walked into the garden
where my mother was dead-heading the Little Lulus
asked her to help him find it in the sawdust below
the half-built planter he was making for her marigolds

in the workshop, blood red as litmus in acid
soaked into sawdust, ends of mahogany, cherry wood, teak
the end of a calloused thumb winter-red and split
mom picked it up, placed it in a Ziploc
drove him to the hospital, still calm, he kept
asking about her flowers, his hand held over his head
wrapped in the old tea towel she had been wearing over her shoulder

he misses that thumb
used it to button the jacket of his
Hitler Jugend uniform as a boy of ten
used it to carry his meager belongings to the ship
bound for Canada after Bremen was destroyed by the Allies
after he swore never to speak of that uniform again

he doesn’t feel like finishing the planter
sometimes he thinks the thumb is still there
and it hurts like a son-of-a-bitch especially
with a sudden change in barometric pressure
his inertia spills into lunch
my mother shelters him from points of knives
offers to butter his bread
her hovering badgers him
into silence      he cracks the angry stump
against faucets and corners

during Scrabble, we challenge him on his use of Kairo
my mother argues that he can’t play a German word
I defy him to find it in any of the six
dictionaries strewn about the kitchen table
besides, the point is moot
as no place names are allowed

flaps of sutured skin open fresh
as he fumbles against the edges
of the dictionary looking for another use
for his prize five-point K

tonight mom and I play alone as he sits in the recliner
facing the television      Saraband for Dead Lovers is on
he’ll drop everything to watch Joan Greenwood
beguile suitors in old British melodramas
soon, we hear a soft snoring, his thumbless hand
propped up on a pillow on the armrest
droplets of blood touch the page edges
of Bremen Kaput open on his tired lap

 

Finalist

Tanis MacDonald

Thermodynamics

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a badger
wintering beneath the porch. A body in motion
tends to stay in motion; the badger breaks from
beneath the steps, humping fast for the dunes
like a platter on legs. Inertia is a dripping
faucet that needs a washer like you need
a drink. Inertia plays the mandolin, a slow
saraband with four drunken musicians in a bar
in Finisterre and you swear you will not leave
until he looks up and shows his bastard face.
He bends an elbow with the fullness of time,
knows Compostela and Kairo and Crete like he
thinks he knows you. Inertia sleeps with
the television on, can’t be bothered with
a haircut, eats but never cooks. Inertia loves you
to keep you from shouting. He huffs and turns
the litmus pink-grey of a pig’s neck. Energy
can be neither stolen nor given away. Inertia
did not beguile you; he seemed like
a good idea at the time. He hogs the bed
in your one-room apartment, sprawled
in the blankets, an accidental monarch. Energy
can be neither knitted or purled. Inertia waits
with your cold boots in a skating shelter,
that lean-to that breaks through the ice and
bobs on the half-thawed river. Inertia does not
believe in the geographical cure, but when you
light out for the coast, he drives the straight shot,
prairies through to ocean. He never fumbles;
he feels no pressure, peer or barometric. Energy
can be neither chewed up nor spat out. Inertia swans about
as though the inevitable heat death of the universe
has nothing to do with him. A body at best will stay
the rest is motion. Inertia has a tendency.

 

Finalist

Heidi Greco

The Uncertainty of Machines

"It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It
flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out." - Markus Zusak

the unreliability of men and their machines
pressure readings skewed by barometrics of the heart
vagaries of temperature breeze or elevation
victims of inertia      varying degrees of rust

the way that dogs will simper and whine whenever they're afraid
at fireworks or sirens in the middle of the night
silent flare of sunspots      rounded fullness of the moon
shelter of rainclouds built up fast in humid midday heat

tall as Tut's sarcophagus      smoothly deco curved
the shining ivory weighscale stood back hidden in the corner
out of sync with screaming effects in the rest of the arcade
shining brass plate still inscribed with careful curling letters

*gebildet in Kairo / made in Cairo*
I drop the copper penny into the slot wait for some response from
the tired old machine deliberations moving gears somewhere deep within
heavy and slow as glaciers in the mountains

calibrated finite lines etched in intersections
show my weight in kilograms pounds and even stone
I prefer the clever sound of ten stone eleven
to the more discouraging thud of a hundred fifty-one

despite beguiling arguments proposing the inverse
life is not the on-line game it sometimes seems to be
cursor's blink the only rhythm natural to the day
artificial heartbeat so misleadingly dull

I fret at sinister dangers      the possibility of faucets reversed
installed by left-handed plumbers who were badgered into rushing
am anxious I might scald myself while fiddling half in sleep
fumbling in the sink at night to fill my hand with water

every bit as I awkwardly I stumble through the days
tottering in triple time to some archaic saraband
listening to tunes that have long gone out of key
remembering stories of airplanes that have fallen from the sky

they say that time will tell      that change is the only sure thing
all a case of entropy      the rise of litmus blue
even the automatic coffee machines
refused my coins this morning

I contemplate the ever-decreasing tension of springs
retain my faith in maybe only levers wedges wheels
question why aluminum repels the magnet's hold
wonder if even that fact will always be true

Finalist

Catherine Moss

Weather Warning

Chinook winds gusting to 80 km/h

This afternoon the wind's
on a barometric rush
ripping the last brown leaves from November poplars
beguiling the litmus-pink
out of frozen geraniums.
It's a manic phase
the wind is loath to lose
a boisterous gene from the Roaring Forties
that makes it fumble plywood
down a dead end alley
badger sullen cardboard boxes
into unaccustomed air.
The wind's multi-lingual, been around the world
more than once
blustering words from billboards
wherever it roams
Calgary nach Kairo
and on to Hong Kong
barefoot in a wild saraband the wind
won't dance alone.
The joyful have no patience with inertia
all's stop and go
like an oversized puppy
untrained to the leash.
Don't sing the wind Gimme shelter
it never will. Let it drink
old snow, lap ice from the outdoor faucet
take you someplace
you've never been before.