Both judges, Diana Anhalt and Jim Barton, selected
the same two poems as winners in the September Poetry Challenge.
Congratulations to Timothy
Cheeseman and Maura Snell. These two poems are
about as different as Anhalt’s and Barton’s poems in the previous post, but
both show excellent craft.
McDonalds
Comes to Milford City
An
inky buggy sulks down Maple Street,
the
clap of iron horseshoes mingling
with
a backhoe’s groans. This morning,
workers
lay brick like bees stuffing hives;
Eli
hitches his mare at Yoder’s Hardware.
A
tin bell jingles as he steps inside;
waxed
hardwood screeches under his Red Wings.
Gliding
through the aisles, he’s a shadow
scratching
his beard over the bin of 10
penny
nails. Hooded bulbs drizzle misty
light
on the feast of metal aroma:
unbruised
hammers, dusty new pipes. He rolls
a
dowel between his fingers, recalling
the
pasture’s tired posts and sagging barbed wire.
Perry
bags staples as Eli fishes
in
his coin purse. Like empty Friday pews,
they
nod in a hymn of silence. Between
the
brass register’s key clacks, Perry cleans
his
pipe and thumbs brittle bills. A storm
of
swallows flees the window sill as Eli
rests
inside his thin suspenders.
Outside,
Eli stashes the staples under
the
buggy’s clapboard seat and glances
where
Lovejoy’s Dollar Store stood last week.
The
sun ignites a massive M leaning
against
stacked cinder block. He remembers
dead
Joe Souder, who flipped his John Deere off
Price Road, and how Joe loved cheeseburgers.
~ Timothy
Cheeseman
Originally
published in The Evansville Review, 2001
Landing
It’s been so many times I forget the way.
I forget the smoothness
of route 89, the car hitching
into cruise control as green
mountains slip up over the dash.
You sleep in the passenger seat, my story
on speakers, windshield splattered
with moth wings. Silver lights
on Main say hello as if the moon hasn’t
set ten times since we left,
the sun hasn’t risen, hasn’t burned.
At the house you troll the property
checking for water. We sit
next to the bonfire, stoke in the dark.
Your mouth is full of intentions.
Your hands are the river’s stones—
smooth, round, warm.
The Army Corps of Engineers
had to dredge it after Irene,
the bartender had said. His t-shirt
is from a bin bag at the Salvation Army.
He watched his house go under.
For our hike we buy peaches at the fruit stand.
The farmer squeezes our cash in his
palm.
It disappears.
From the top of Mount Tom we see
everything. You feed me
because my hands are dirty.
I eat because I can.
We come with the intention of new settlers.
We come stomping our feet in the dirt.
~ Maura Snell
Bios:
Timothy
Cheeseman is currently a guidance counselor at Shawnee High School in
Lima, Ohio where he previously taught literature and theatre. He has a B.S.
from The Ohio State University and a M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University
and studied under Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
A former Sacramento Poetry Prize Winner and Ciardi prize finalist, he last
placed work in the Evansville Review and Facets Poetry Magazine.
Prior to teaching he worked as a professional social worker, college professor,
naturalist, cook, and janitor. He was raised in the predominately Mennonite
town of Plain City, Ohio. He resides in Lima, Ohio with wife Kellie Armey and
two sons Tristam and Charley.
Maura
Snell is co-founder and Poetry Editor at The Tishman Review, and
is a freelance editor, having worked on such projects as the forthcoming
anthology The Golden Shovel Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University
of Arkansas Press, 2017). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The
Bennington Review, Red Paint Hill Quarterly, MomEgg Review, Brain Child
Magazine, and in the anthology Our Last Walk: Using Poetry for
Grieving and Remembering Our Pets (University Professors Press, 2016). She
splits her time between Massachusetts and Vermont.
