John O’Conner, the judge for this month selected three winning poems. Third placed goes to Melissa Huff for “Where Do All the Colors Go.:
Where Do All the Colors Go
As blues intensify above—
before they fade to winter
white—
we crush the russet underfoot,
along with marigold and dusty
orange, grind them with the red
of brick. But where’s the
verdant green?
November swaddles it with cold
and cradles it within the earth
to birth again in fertile
spring.
~ Melissa Huff
O’Conner commented, “This painterly poem captures the rainbow of autumn in direct language with nice sounds and a sprightly meter. I like the hopeful turn to the forthcoming “verdant green” that we know will come again…eventually! The second half reminded me of the great folk song The Dutchman – whose title character “thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow” -- by Michael Peter Smith. (Michael was a brilliant musician and songwriter, and a friend of mine, who passed last year).”
The second place poem is very different. It is a “cadralor.” The poet explained this form: “The cadralor is a five-stanza non-narrative form created by poets Christopher Cadra and Lori Howe in August 2000. Each stanza is meant to stand as an independent poem. While these stanzas are meant to be contextually unrelated, this does not preclude thematic connections which may surface in varying contexts in different sections of the complete work. The fifth stanza should stand as the crucible in which the work's underlying themes come together, though these themes can be implied or inferred, rather than implicitly stated. For more info on the form, please visit https://gleampoets.org/.”
Sections of Understanding Were Imposed
a cadralor, title after John Ashbery
1
November’s a devil month down to the name—Samhain in Irish—
and leaves a rainbow of splintered glass. Black eyes reflect trees,
which, ebony-barked atop gold and rust, hoot with owlish hunger.
I’m overrun as the vacant church at Saint-Étienne-Le-Vieux-Caen,
ivy trapezes beneath stone arches and a brook speaks in tongues,
babbling along the nave. Church scene’s Photoshopped, total fake,
but the whiff of moldering foliage genuine enough to summon it.
2
The article I’m reading states the universe is locked in one long
sequestration. Galaxies move lock-step without gravity to keep it
flush as a dinner plate, upon which to place Thanksgiving turkey.
Skip green-bean casserole. Save room for dark matter cosmology.
It’s quantum entanglement, like a wife loudly berating a husband,
while family and guests listen, not to buy more Girl Scout cookies,
he’s too fat and suburban, as if the man sees Jesus in a Thin Mint.
3
I keep getting concerned calls for my afterlife’s extended warranty.
Tell the robo-caller to get lost, it starts prostituting—postulating
or proselytizing. Like being on the phone with a snake in your ear,
slithering between weeds, tongue flicking to tickle the grey matter,
twisting as if a brain was cork, designed for a serpentine corkscrew.
Maybe I should be thankful for metal screw lids on whiskey bottles
or make some Irish coffee and recite my prayers through its cream.
4
Sun croons a love song in neutrinos, fusing protons into lithium,
which withheld me from dreaming, decelerated my internal clock.
It took a year to start dreaming again, think of the Moon Rabbit
when I looked at the night sky, saw half a rabbit—the head half—
and remembered the story: Rabbit throwing itself into a cook fire
because it had nothing but its own flesh to feed an old beggar,
the rabbit in the moon a reflection of this act—another love song.
5
Rain or snow coming. Nothing hollow in the quiet as grass sways,
careless about which way wind blows and caught in a querl for it.
John Lennon chants “Number Nine.” November’s out for blood—
its nineness a noneness—name for the Old English blood-month.
Name all the animals sacrificed while the song plays backwards,
to appease the gods, stock the larder for blizzard and apocalypse.
A snippet of Lakme’s flower duet as red snowflakes begin to fall.
~ Jonathan Yungkans
The judge’s remarks: “Ok, I’ll admit I had not come across this form before. But this poem immediately struck me with its lively language(s). I love the code switching here – the jumps in diction from low (“Tell the robo-caller to get lost) to high (“sun croons a love song in neutrinos”). Its abstractions hint at the month of November, with the bookending first and last lines of the poem nodding directly at the season. The title anticipates the readers’ anxiety over the kaleidoscope of images that follow, but the author’s love of words here has a momentum all its own.”
First place went to a poem in another form: a cento, in which each line comes from a different poem:
All Souls’ Day
There, at the pivot
of the seasons
a low light is floating
like smoke
in a rising wind.
It fades in, fades out
again, and cloud shadows
chill through our skin
like a brushstroke
in a fog.
Afraid to be alone,
a body without
defense
succumbs to a slow ache—
a reenactment or a revenant?
How much we carry around
the old faces
now blind and hunkered in the earthen air.
November, late in the day
and the glow of the sunset scattered.
Planet growing colder, little
corkscrew of smoke, a wisp of blue
emptiness
fading into night.
~ Patrice Boyer Claeys
Cento Sources: D. H. Lawrence, May Sarton, Elizabeth Bishop, David Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, Kirill Medvedev, Brendan Galvin, Alice B. Fogel, Jack Vian, Giovanni Pascoli, Robert Pinsky, Michelle S. Reed, Engracia Melendez, Peter Munro, Jake Adam York, Martha Collins, Robert Duncan, John Wilkinson, Sherod Santos, John M. Ridland, John Gould Fletcher, Theophile Gautier, Stepen Dunn, David Mason
John O’Conner explains his choice of this poem for first place: “A main challenge in writing this kind of poem (a cento) is the difficulty in suturing together lines from such different voices. But this poem expertly captures the essence of November by seamlessly weaving together lines from 25 different poets. I especially like the simultaneous attention to the freighted (“how much we carry around) and the fleeting (“a wisp of smoke…fading into night) senses of the 11th month. And I enjoyed the movement into the interior world of the speaker which imitates our desire to escape the chill of the season.”
Congratulations to the three winners, and thanks to everyone who entered the November Poetry Challenge. Each of the winners retains rights to his or her own poem.
Come back soon to check out the December Poetry Challenge.
Bios:
Patrice Boyer Claeys is the author of three poetry volumes: Lovely Daughter of the Shattering (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Machinery of Grace (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Honey from the Sun (with Gail Goepfert, Blurb.com, 2020). A collaborative chapbook, This Hard Business of Living, (also with Goepfert), is due from Seven Kitchens Press in 2021. Patrice has served as a judge of Wilda Morris’s Poetry Challenge and has been nominated for both Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. More at www.patriceboyerclaeys.com.
Melissa Huff feeds her poetry from many sources—the mystery of the natural world, the way humans everywhere connect and the importance of spirit. Her love for reading poetry aloud won her awards in 2019 and 2020 in the BlackBerry Peach Prizes for Poetry: Spoken and Heard, sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Recent publishing credits include Gyroscope Review, Blue Heron Review, Persimmon Tree, and Northern Colorado Writers’ Chiarascuro: Anthology of Virtue & Vice. Melissa has been frequently sighted making her way – by car, train or airplane – between Illinois and Colorado.
John S. O’Connor teaches English at New Trier High School and Education at Northwestern. He has written two books on the teaching of writing, two books of haiku, and three chapbooks of poems. His poems have appeared in places such as Rhino, Bennington Review, Poetry East and The Cortland Review. O’Connor has written essays and reviews in places like Colorado Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Schools, and Under the Sun. His last two essays were Named Notable in Best American Essays, and one also in Best American Sports Writing. He is the creator and host of Schooled: the Podcast www.schooledthepodcast.com.
Jonathan Yungkans is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Gleam: a Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen's Quinterly, Synkroniciti and a number of other publicaitons and was recently included in The International Literary Quarterly's ongoing anthology of California poets. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Competition and was published by Tebor Bach in 2021.
© Wilda Morris
