August 2019 Poetry Challenge Winners - Return

Karla Linn Merrifield at Age Seven

The first place winner this month used a Japanese form, haibun, which begins with prose and ends with a haiku-like poem.

Land’s Edge

We had to cross the Monongahela at the First Street Bridge to reach the eastside state road, the far side from home in my child-mind—way over there to reach the Pettigrews’ summer camp a dozen miles downriver on the East Fork. Twice each year for three years—I was 7, 8, 9—our Aunt Gertie’s friend Dottie P. let my brother Robin and me come too.

The visits smelled of sulfur water from the well, musty cots, cigarette smoke. You could hear mice afoot. Mosquitoes’ mean drone meaning the after-bites scent of calamine lotion. Stepping outdoors, after dark, when speedboats’ marine gasoline fumes have floated away? All I could smell was green river, green trees.

From the end of the dock I saw stars, abundant fireflies, a bare yellow bulb outside the screened room door, my night’s dim lights. Black against black, silently, bats gleaned humid August air. I heard  frogs, crickets, cicadas and a pair of great-barred owls—an evensong, its melody the flow lapping at the bank on the best night of childhood before we woke up to learn that Dot’s mom, Maggie, recently released again from the asylum in Weston, supposedly in a manic phase, went and drowned herself in a puddle.

Bathing suit mildewed

in a pastel pink suitcase

days of ruining

~ Karla Linn Merrifield

The August judge, Diana Anhalt, said, “the use of strong imagery is very effective: ‘...far side from home in my child-mind,’ ‘Mosquitoes' mean drone...,’ ‘after-bites scent of calamine lotion,’” among others. She also liked the three images in the closing haiku, and complicated the poet on her ability to “show rather than just tell” in this “compelling—and very moving—narrative.”

The second place poem is very different in many ways.

Dry Months

I'm on a morning hike to exhume

something arcane and precious from soil,

rich or putrefied -

—mushroom, helleborine, maybe

an aboriginal axe blade -

but the ground's as hard as bad luck.

One good look around me

and the treasure map in my head crumples.

The woods are corrosion in withered green.

Sun's a viper coiled around the throat

and biting fierce.

Failure points are everywhere,

in the stillness, the painted dry,

the heart-worn droop of branches.

And there's the stories

scratched plain as dust in the river bed,

no rain, no cooling, no current,

just stains head high to a floundering river trout.

It all makes sense.

The long drought has bumped all living

into the background.

What the weather couldn't steal,

it broke.

Coarse, raw, brown, baked...

no surface is its own.

I will return with nothing.

And I believe that's everything.

~ John Grey

Anhalt spoke of the poet’s “ability to convey meaning through the use of effective images such as: ‘ground's as hard as bad luck,’ ‘sun's viper coiled around the throat.”’ She also commented on the interesting use of language, as in "What the weather couldn't steal, it broke."

In counterpoint to these serious poems, Anhalt picked a humorous work for third place.

August returns

August is back, those dog days of summer,

I already feel like it’s a bummer.

It’s summertime, I got the blues,

Whatever happened to barbecues?

When was summer ever a grand picnic?

How did I get so old, so quick?

People are constantly moving away,

solitude is my summer so gray.

The fall is a ball when school starts,

I am a student of the visual arts.

But summertime has lost its luster,

doomed to die alone like Custer.

Nobody knows how to communicate,

smart phones dumber than a primate.

If telemarketers didn’t bother to call,

I wouldn’t get any phone calls at all.

Everybody’s having fun at their summer home,

here I sit alone writing this poem.

Everybody’s taking a fun vacation,

I don’t even have a TV to watch a station.

But I better be grateful, in God I trust,

even in the midst of the long month August.

If I feel grateful, if I feel weary,

wait till the return of January!

~ Mark Hudson

Perhaps the weather in Atlanta, Georgia, when Anhalt was judging the poems, enhanced her view of Hudson’s poem—it was 90 degrees. Anhalt liked the humor of the poem, Hudson’t use of couplets, and his rhyming, especially the unusual combination of “luster” and “Custer.”

Anhalt also gave an honorable mention.

Penniless Denni

gives lovely little gifts

a pebble, a painted paper clip

on random occasions

you never expect

asking only 

Please return the wrap.

Don’t waste.

Spread joy 

not crap and 

Please 

return the wrap.

~ Joe Cottonwood

My daughters laugh at me for reusing gift wrap, so they may suspect that I wrote this poem, but I didn't. Anhalt enjoyed the humor, as well as the use of rhythm and rhyme. She also commented on “how the writer conveys the message central to the title, i.e. “penniless,” by illustrating (rather than telling) with the last line in each of the 2 stanzas: "Please return the wrap."

Thank you to Diana Anhalt for judging, and congratulations to the four winning poets. They retain copyright on their poems.

Another challenge will be posted on September first. Maybe it will be your turn to win.

Bios

Diana Anhalt, a former resident of Mexico City, Mexico—her parents moved there in 1950 in order to escape the McCarthy era—made that country her home for sixty years.  She married a Mexican, had two children, taught and served on the board of the American School Foundation, and subsequently edited their newsletter, “Focus,”for eight years. She resided in Mexico City until 2010. During that time, her work, which has included essays, book reviews, poetry and a book, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965 (Archer Books) has appeared in both English and Spanish. She subsequently moved to Atlanta, GA with her late husband, Mauricio, in order to be closer to family.

Joe Cottonwood has worked as a carpenter, plumber, and electrician for most of his life and is also the award-winning author of nine published novels, two books of poetry, and a memoir. He lives in the coastal mountains of California where he built a house and raised a family under (and at the mercy of) giant redwood trees. His most recent book is Foggy Dog: Poems of the Pacific Coast. joecottonwood.com

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dunes Review, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Thin Air, Dalhousie Review and failbetter.

Mark Hudson is a poet, writer, artist, and ceramicist. He appears on Evanston Cable TV, and he had a hidden track on the first local 101 CD. He has designed art for a front cover on a one-time run of a magazine called Puffy Fruit. He has an ancestry of artists going back in history to Europe including Charles Lucy, who has paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 700+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 14 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the newly released full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. Her Godwit:  Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye.

© Wilda Morris

August 2019 Poetry Challenge - Return (again)

Mexican Wall (Photo by Wilda Morris)

When Diana Anhalt was taken to Mexico as a child of eight, she expected to return to the Bronx soon; she didn’t know her parents were moving to Mexico. This experience lies behind the following poem.

There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets your future in.”  Graham Greene

Mexico,

mother of lopsided logic, defensive driving,  the shrug, arrived on my doorstep

when I was eight and entered, trumpets blasting, rolling her R’s.

She flashed a finger, danced a zapateo down my spine.

She had clouds in her pocket, mint on her breath, thunder in her bosom

and a tongue to fold around words like huitzilopochtli. For me,

she dressed in fuchsia, wore jacarandas in her hair.  Let me

wrap you in my silk- fringed rebozo she crooned, you will be mine.

She blew on the dice, tossed them once and taught me to jaywalk

through life under the eye of her blood-giddy sun.

So I cast off the Bronx like yesterday’s vows, forgot the words

to Girl Scout songs, fear of dark places under the El,

but kept my ice skates, my accent, the scars on my knees.

She filled my ears with marimbas and gossip, sang me her tunes

until I called her my own: Let me home in the marrow of your bones,

porque nunca hay retorno.

 There is no return.

~ Diana Anhalt

From “Mexico,” because there is no return (Passager Books, 2015), p. 15.

I love the fresh metaphors and similes, such as “clouds in her pocket,” and “she blew on the dice.” I also love the beautiful, sensuous images. Anhalt gives us color, movement, scent, texture, sound, and taste—all five senses are engaged. There are unexpected word combinations, such as “lopsided logic” and “marimbas and gossip.” Even if you don’t know what all the Spanish words mean, you can get the richness of the buffet which this poem invites us to partake of.

The prompt last month was for a poem on the theme of “return” or “returning.” The judges determined that there was no winning poem, so the prompt this month is repeated this month. The prompt word is so rich that I’m confident someone will submit a winning poem this month. The word return can be used in a wide variety of ways (scroll down or click "older post" to see the ideas posted last month, or check a good dictionary).

Also look at the July 1 post to see the example poems. They are worth re-reading.

I put the word “return” in the search engines of the websites of the American Academy of Poets at https://poets.org/search?combine=return, and that of The Poetry Foundation in Chicago at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=return. Check these links if your would like to read other “return” poems.

The August Challenge:

The prompt for August is the word “return,” in any of its forms, as noun, verb or adjective. Be creative; take the prompt in a unique direction if you can.

Your poem may be free verse or formal. If you use a form, please identify the form when you submit your poem.

Title your poem unless it is a form that does not use titles. Single-space. Note that the blog format does not accommodate long lines; if they are used, they have to be broken in two, with the second part indented or put in small print, as is the case with this month's prompt poem.

You may submit a published poem if you retain copyright, but please include publication data. This applies to poems published in books, journals, newspapers, or on the Internet.

The deadline is August 15. Poems submitted after the deadline will not be considered. There is no charge to enter, so there are no monetary rewards; however, winners are published on this blog. Please don’t stray too far from “family-friendly” language (some children and teens read this blog). No simultaneous submissions, please. You should know by the end of the month whether or not your poem will be published. Decision of the judge or judges is final.

The poet retains copyright on each poem. If a previously unpublished poem wins and is published elsewhere later, please give credit to this blog. I do not register copyright with the US copyright office, but by US law, the copyright belongs to the writer unless the writer assigns it to someone else.

If the same poet wins three months in a row (which has not happened thus far), he or she will be asked not to submit the following two months.

How to Submit Your Poem:

Send one poem only to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”). Put “August Poetry Challenge Submission” in the subject line of your email. Include a brief bio that can be printed with your poem if you are a winner this month. Please put your name and bio UNDER the poem in your email. If the poem has been published before, please put that information UNDER the poem also. NOTE: If you sent your poem to my other email address, or do not use the correct subject line, the poem may get lost and not be considered for publication.

If you submitted a poem on this theme in July, you may revise and resubmit your poem, or submit another poem, if you wish.

Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a winner, so be sure that you put your name (exactly as you would like it to appear if you do win) at the end of the poem.

Poems may be pasted into an email or sent as an attachment (Doc, Docx, rich text or plain text; no pdf files, please). Please do not indent the poem or center it on the page. It helps if you submit the poem in the format used on the blog (Title and poem left-justified; title in bold (not all in capital letters); your name at the bottom of the poem). Also, please do not use multiple spaces instead of commas in the middle of lines. I have no problem with poets using that technique (I sometimes do it myself). However I have difficulty getting the blog to accept and maintain extra spaces.

Poems shorter than 40 lines are generally preferred but longer poems will be considered.

Bio:

Diana Anhalt, a former resident of Mexico City, Mexico—her parents moved there in 1950 in order to escape the McCarthy era—made that country her home for sixty years.  She married a Mexican, had two children, taught and served on the board of the American School Foundation, and subsequently edited their newsletter, “Focus,”for eight years. She resided in Mexico City until 2010. During that time, her work, which has included essays, book reviews, poetry and a book, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965 (Archer Books) has appeared in both English and Spanish. She subsequently moved to Atlanta, GA with her late husband, Mauricio, in order to be closer to family.

© Wilda Morris