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Home  Education Education Events Adult Division Sonnets
1st Place Winner
Quilt
By Julia G. Wilson
I’ve touched a quilt, its faded edges frayed
where dying fingers worked the fabric raw.
A tired woman soothed the hands and stayed
to wash away death’s smell but still she saw
the shapes of bodies under quilts on beds.
The pieces showed no map of how to grieve.
Women are the washers of the dead,
the first to come, and late at night, the last to leave.
Now on this quilt flesh touches flesh again.
Lives begun and ended here all fade away
but always women know the taste of skin
and how it feels to be the one to stay.
Dark rooms, low talk, the smell of soap and death.
Bear paw, drunkard’s path, baby’s last breath.
2nd Place Winner
Amerasian
By Vincent T. Mallory
What made me think that one day I would know
What secret glides there, catlike, that you hide
Behind those rustling curtains; why the glow
Of lanterns flutters briefly from inside?
Soft light on quiet waters, was the way
I once described you to a trusted friend.
An open secret; something by Monet
That seems just flowers. Yet you look again.
Jazz music wrapped in fog across the water
Punctuates my cigarette’s last hiss,
Then it sinks too. I wonder what brought her
And now me to haunt this pier like this?
Bemused, I stand here ‘til the dawn.
When steam has vanished, and illusion’s gone.
3rd Place Winner
Bookstore
By William Baer
The “celebrity” memoir was moving fast,
a Times bestseller. She opened a copy and checked
the index for her names, both first and last.
Neither was there. What did she expect?
That he’d remember Lisbon from years ago,
the weeks in Cascais, their lover’s pirouette?
That he’d lament the one who’d told him, “No,”
that she’d, somehow, still be his “one” regret?
She put the book back down, and left the store,
then calmly got in her car, heading uptown,
never reading in chapter twenty-four
about “Marie” in quotes, who’d “turned him down,”
who was his “only, ever, perfect love,”
whom he was “still and always” thinking of.
Honorable Mentions Cartographer
By William Baer
(d. 1863)
On every Brazilian map of the Amazon,
thirteen miles south of São Miguel,
above the Amor basin, you’ll come upon
the tiny tropic town of Isabel.
But if you really travel to the place,
there’s nothing there; there’s nothing there
at all, but swamp, and sun, and maybe just a trace
of wind that whispers her name in the sultry air.
Because these maps descend from those once drawn
by Tôrres, the master, who clearly understood,
when he awoke alone in his tent at dawn,
that Isabel had run away for good,
so he could mark his cartographic lie,
and mark her name, forever, and call goodbye.
To My Neighbor
By Catharine Dixon
Water tells a story of seafaring;
my toilet singing along with yours
late at night. We share a load bearing
wall, insulation our barren shore
of adjacent isles. Furl your sail
and drift through empty straits of halls
where a harbor sits tranquil against hail
and gust, protection for your hull.
My balcony’s seized by dirty pigeons,
but come and view the red leaves running
on dead grass, and stand in the fast wind.
I’ll hold your hand against the railing.
Like the trade winds you’ll turn south someday,
but tonight, I won’t let you blow away.
Summer Rain, Arkansas
By Robert Griffith
We fished until the light was swallowed up
In cattails, until our cobweb lines had dimmed
Against the sloe-black pond, and then, fed up
With empty hooks, we headed home. Loose-limbed
And tired, I climbed into the car while Dad
Broke down our rods and packed away our gear.
Our headlights piled the dark against the sad,
Cruel edge of Highway 64 and seared
The center lane with white. I slept, then woke
To find a rain-slick road, now cooled and steaming.
And soon the frogs came out, like some baroque
Parade. The shocks fluttered with each bump, streaming
Skin and blood against the car. The night
Spun on. I stared ahead and held on tight.
F-16 Crashes Outside Strawberry Plains, Tennessee
By Robert Griffith
-- May 17, 2004
His chute still furled but trailing as he drops,
He is an exclamation point plunging
Down the sky’s blue page, his smoke-wreathed jet
A pencil smudge arcing off the margin
To crash across the Holston. Letters unsent,
A woman leans against her mailbox, numb
With fear, and watches as his silhouette
Is swallowed up by fields of early corn.
And even though he falls no further off
Than fifty yards or so, she hears no sounds
Except her own hot pulse within her ears
And the ceaseless wash of summer breeze—
That machinery of May that breathes and hums
As if to say that nothing new could happen.
Reading Hamlet
By Robert Griffith
In fresh-pressed jeans, an Oxford shirt, and tie,
He smiled too quick at every upward glance
From his professor. Those smiles, she thought, came
Unholstered fast as desperados’ guns
And took a bead on ankles, legs, and eyes.
Behind glasses thin as eggshell, he made
The most unlikely Hamlet she’d ever had
In class—a chipper Dane, all teeth and fresh-
Scrubbed skin. Beguiled by lovely words and lanced
By beauty, he saw her now, she knew, as sad
Ophelia, and he the dashing, lovestruck swain.
Too bad, she thought, he never read the play
And learned that poison leaves the heart undone,
That water drowns the ones in lovers’ dress.
Leaving by Train
Robert Griffith
The platform, long and black against the green
Surrounding hills, shines with pools of rain
That cast back the clearing sky in cold,
Uncertain blues. Alone, he stands and waits,
The quiet morning gone, the 10:15
A dream of steel and light not yet arrived.
Though barely spring, delphinium and rue
Burst along the verge, their crowbar roots
Crowding every fissure, every crease and fold.
He wonders why his heart, a paper hive
Long empty, remains immune to change
While the whole prismatic world dissolves. The shoots
Of tulips tremble in the breeze, still freighted
With rain. He shuts his eyes against the view.
Parallax
By Robert Griffith
The English dawn trembles behind the poplars
And drowns the stars, one by one, in milklight
As I walk out across the heath, scattering
Rabbits and one startled lapwing, which dopplers
From left to right and back again in fear.
The pond beside the house is still, reflects
A sky as grey and soft as wool, and only
Venus—that bright, cold chip of ice—appears
Upon the surface. Four thousand miles away,
You sleep, and when you wake in that silk night
Of Midwest heat and see a smattering
Of stars, they’ll look the same, but in array
They’re slightly changed. You too—your eyes, your neck,
More lovely with distance and lonely skies. |
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