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2007 First
Place With the Tide
by Rachel Grotsky |
an armless grip on a plastic handle poured
distilled black-brown scald,
hot rotten breast milk into cupped and
trembling hands.
her maternal always found the cracks, and
they would have to lick their fingers.
There was an evaporative polish on her statue-shaped wound;
she aged centuries in hours alone with children,
who like curious strangers would stare at her teeth,
which were seeds swollen with juice,
which broke often, and stained their only suits.
There was a positioning of feet
on foreign glaciers, behind a paper door in the coat closet;
there was a silhouette in the hallway, and every night
someone would poison the pets.
She came out of this box melting,
an iceberg whispering language about babies,
sighing around corners, leaking everywhere
flooding the house; bruised fruit bobbed in corners,
and one fruit was her mouth, and anchored itself to the
ceiling, and was toothless and seedless, and its lips
came apart completely, and refugees and seabirds
spilled out on the sand in arks,
and everyone was dead of thirst.
She collected sand rubies.
fluorescent islands shivered in sweat-water tide pools;
she felt the wet, and the dry, and
borrowed something from herself.
She stabbed into gangrene legless,
into scrotum fingers in pudding; she stabbed into Seaside, who
carried the seasons in water balloons.
this stabbing went into his no-gender
into his soft
and he writhed.
but really she pretended to sleep,
and later made coffee
when the floor wasn’t cold. |
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2007 Second
Place
The White Ponyby Ceirra j. Buell
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Draw a pony with your finger. Spread the white dust
on the glass and form it into something beautiful. Take my pen apart and
use it for riding. I will be out back burning things, you know, like
pincher bugs and t-shirts. I'll pour lighter fuel on the counter and
light it with a match. Only the fuel will burn and the flames will
shortly disappear.
Freedom: when you break the pony into rows of glory with your razor, you
get trapped behind them because you didn't leave enough space between to
escape. Leaving your razor and I alone to discuss the situation
maturely. |
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2007 Third
Place
Alone Starby Dustin Verburg
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A Texas exorcism of
the apparitions of perished
Sheriffs was performed during abnormal circumstances.
Enhancing the ectoplasmic stream of thoughts,
the governor wrought the fury of the electric current chair.
The cactus glowing, owing much of its luster to the unrest and lust
of the switchblade elections held after dusk.
The skull on the Cadillac hull’s horns dripped with
red liquid, daring the spirits to play it at chicken.
The moon itself quivered, afraid of the
Poltergeist politicians.
As desert ghosts replaced the stars, the far reaches
of the cosmos grew evil and brittle,
shining too close for even the smallest comfort.
No milky way remained, just a thousand
disembodied brains, each blinking a
Phantasmagoric Horror in the northern sky. |
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2006
Tyler Brewington
The Gates |
She wants to remember how they were spoken before they were built.
She takes notes. She keeps the notes in the back of a book. She sees the
sketches. She resents the interpretive dance. She observes the traffic
at lunchtime. She drafts a concession stand for the zoo. She visits the
Air Force Academy. She admires her brother inside the design of the
uniform inside the design of the structures. She borrows the original
plans for her building. She locates the haunted stairs. She invites the
hanging ghost to show himself. She needs to know why they return to
saffron-colored nylon as a theme. She folds her bed into the wall. She
makes a living room. |
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| 2006 Cassie Seawell
today I am looking |
today I am looking like the spot on your beach shoe.
I look like the spot shrinking at rain splash every time you step.
now all the modernists are doing rivers and bridges,
pressing the space through the rubbery surface of the tiny globe,
the river swelling with space the water takes up and the concrete shell stained.
a photograph of a spot would never make it into this history book;
the history of water is the shorter history of a place for gathering.
they all have an egg that won’t break but won’t become alive,
a box of the pink wine, a bedroll, a fountain of round beans.
this map is so ordinary with its geometrics rubbing right up against one another.
it speaks vaguely, and I hear it, of a bay you’ve been to, a place you remember
but have never been.
I put the map to my ear; the lines functionally trace out my face, bordering the inlet.
there is one spot, I think it must be between my cheek and brow,
that looks like the clay you sculpted;
you put it on display next to my coffee grinder.
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