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| 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
