The 5th annual Jack Grapes Poetry Prize Contest was the toughest ever to judge. We received over 600 poems from all over the U.S.A. and abroad! So many truly fine poems; we were hard-pressed to decide on the winners.
Here they are:
$250/First Prize: Lee Rossi “Pastures”
$150/Second Prize: Kelly Grace Thomas “The Polite Bird of Story”
$100/Third Prize: Meg Eden “Her Arms Are Calendars”
$50/each 5 Finalists:
(in alphabetical order)
Steve Henn “A Melody”
Tony Gloeggler “About Time”
Natasha Moni “We have all been that woman on the bottom of the pool”
Beate Sigriddaughter “Emily Watches Her Husband Bring Kate A Glass Of Water”
Rebecca Schumejda “Anniversary Poem”
Additionally, we wanted to include these ten, Honorable Mentions:
(in alphabetical order)
Elaine Alarcon “An Absence”
John Bellinger “Whither”
Olivia Collins “Blood Orange”
Peggy Dobreer “Is There A Doctor In The House?”
Evelyn Duboff “Smoke”
Debra Franco “I Will Not Die In Paris”
Peter M. Gordon “My Therapist Told Me to Change My Socks”
Arminé Iknadossian “Ossuary”
Tanya Ko Hong “Confronting My Father’s Mistress”
Janaya Martin “Long-term Relationship”
The 6th Annual Jack Grapes’ Poetry Prize Contest opens on July 1st, 2018 and runs through August 31st, 2018. We eagerly look forward to reading your poems!
Alexis Rhone Fancher
Poetry Editor
Cultural Weekly
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*****
Pastures
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
Woody Guthrie
A friend calls to say she’s been in the hospital again, not just the E.R., but intensive care, her blood pressure erratic as the stock market. It’s been raining there, mudslides and flash floods sweeping household pets into canyons. At least, she’s still got her view of the Pacific, even if she’s not enjoying it like she used to. Up here, I tell her, the lawns are drying out, sunburnt like an old man’s skull - the hottest year on record, two years in a row. How long can we keep the string alive, the sportscaster jokes with the weatherman. GPS won’t help us navigate the Anthropocene - terrible name for this terrible new age. We see it coming on the Weather Channel - windstorm, firestorm, deluge - but refuse to do anything that might make our lives less comfortable. Thank you, say the forests, raining ash and cinders on suburban roofs. Thank you, say the streambeds, charting the dried arteries of the past. Our dog, a rescue pet, has the whole back yard, brown and dusty as himself, to shit in. We’ve loved and cared for him like the finest pure bred, but he’s damaged goods, barks at every leaf blower and garbage man, bites friends and strangers without distinction, shivers when our daughter howls with headache or anxiety. Last week someone in our church lost her son, twenty-one and with a history of drugs and alcohol. His girlfriend found him in bed, unconscious. He never woke up. Was it drugs? Alcohol? Nobody will say. All they’ll say is what a bright spirit he was, how creative, filled with life. And now it’s gone, nobody’s fault. At least nobody’s taking the blame.
Lee Rossi (photo at top) has authored 3 books of poetry, most recently Wheelchair Samurai from Plain View Press. His poems, reviews and interviews have appeared widely in journals such as the Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore and the Sun. Although he currently lives in the Bay Area, he still thinks fondly of L.A., where he lived and wrote for over 30 years.
***
The Polite Bird of Story
Takes flight, against God or the sky.
We are always open domes looking for rest.
All the linoleum stung with spilled salt.
The cabinets full of hard parts.
I have been thinking about the shells
of Russians Dolls snapping like twigs
under the hunter’s footsteps.
The way each woman looks in the mirror and
sees the window a sparrow flew into.
Sometimes there is too much female
they call it monster. I roil a tiny teakettle
behind this mug shot of picket teeth. Perfection
a cold cup of tea. This menu of vacancy, I chew
and chew. Please don’t watch me eat.
The living room for sitting. The bedroom for silence.
My mother’s breath wintered. My father speaks in drywall.
Their daughter: a museum. Put a rope around this smile.
Quote the hours I spent like dried paint.
And in this world there are kitchens and there
are mothers. Both cold like the sky left waiting.
Food is another ghost story
the starved like to tell.
***
Her Arms Are Calendars
Despite warning labels reading: do not use on skin,
Kelly used her arms like paper reams, writing
Gelly Roll reminders: Math problem set due Tuesday.
Call Anna. I told her the ink was toxic
but she shrugged, drawing a heart on the gap
between her ring and pinkie fingers.
The marks were milky pink, luminescent even—
I think about the radium girls who painted
their teeth glow-in-the-dark for late-night pranks,
who pointed their paintbrush tips with their lips
the way their managers showed them, who were told
the only effect from radium was some color in their cheeks—
In the dark, the radium girls glowed like those clocks
they made, even the dust on their corsets was illuminated.
One girl got her tooth pulled but the whole jaw came with it.
Another broke her leg tripping on the dance floor.
I don’t know what it’s like, to feel my jaw collapse
like an eroded cliff, teeth falling out, honeycombed bone—
my mother, on my getting married, gives me three pump-
bottles of Johnson & Johnson baby soap. If it’s made
for babies, it’s gotta be safe, she says. I don’t tell her
about the article that just came out: the moms asking why
there’s formaldehyde in that soap. I can’t know
what gave my mother her fibromyalgia. I wash
my hands in her soap— it’s been three years
and I still haven’t gone through all the bottles.
