Winner - Teen Poem

Merit O.

JAINISM

reserve your greatest sympathy
for the spider, she said--his life a comma, 
         a space for breath
when the day wears thin; in eulogy
we will offer orange rinds, oriole 
feathers
which still remember the cadence of flight. 
         after the scarlet song
of august, and while curling away like 
a memory
left on the palm of a window ledge to fade
I cradled the afterlife, a copper coin 
on the roof of my mouth--
         sought sanctuary in lockets
with faces smooth as worry stones
and separated from my skeleton 
waiting for silk to flower from my 
footprints
like nimbus,
slips of cloud carried close.
         the seasons stuck together,
wet leaves with their fingers laced;
I traced spider nerves, 
spider eyelashes, spider
syndesmoses forming faults
on the earth spread open like a 
birthmark,
pale and static under the skin.
after he dies, she said, we will 
resolve him
into things we have forgotten--
         the branches and leaves
stretching for sunlight 
in our lungs.  the breaking of grief
onto a shore without sound.

“Jainism” is by Merit O. Copyright © 2008 by Merit O. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.

Winner - Adult Poem

Trenton H.

FANTASIA ON PICASSO’S “MANDOLIN, FRUIT BOWL, AND PLASTER ARM” (1925)

1.
 
The point of the whole thing
Is that mandolins and fruit bowls
Are so infrequently at ease together
On wooden tables
 
Crowded with plaster arms, not to mention
Arms that clutch rigid white bars and smash them 
Through gray shadows, slivering them
Into hints of a thousand fists.
 
So much coiled on a lonely table:
Music, food, violence. An orange cloth
Curls around each item—charms,
Warms, dominates.
 

2.
 
The mandolin speaks its strings as an aside, exposes
The gaping hole in its belly. When it is strummed
Alongside the plaster arm, the mandolin feels 
 
The green islands of fruit tremble 
In the sea of their wide bowl, senses how
Its muted chords shiver the trapped sunlight of their juice.
  
 
3.
 
You can always rely on the table.
This is a rule that all children instinctively know.
Four legs, planks split from trees
Resilient with unsapped history, dark

Stains of knotty wood screwed up
Into discreet silence. Place a  mandolin
On the table’s top, spread a bowl of  fruit wide
In surrender, splay a plaster arm still raw
 
At its wrenched joint.  The table will not speak,
Will not creak.  It will support the weight
Of secrets with strength to spare.
 

4. 

Of course, the ripple of orange cloth
Could be less plebeian than it appears.
Velvet, perhaps?  Some sort of tinted chamois?

With the muted pluck of the mandolin’s strings, the bowl poised
To spill its fruit to the first pleading passer-by, the arm
Blanched and dead, who would dare hazard a guess?
 
 
5.
 
The arm cannot release its tight grip.
See the fingers hardened around the  bar.
They are addicted to it.
They sense its staid length and try to forget
The ignominy of being placed on a barren table  
In an orange-cloth starkness, the low 
Vibrations of a mandolin’s strings
Humming through wood, the curse
Of awful green fruit that roll too easily
In their open bowl.

6. 

When you are a bowl, you have to realize
That one day green fruit will be plucked
From the hollow of your bosom
And sucked dry before you.
This horror, inexplicable to mandolins
And their resonant emptiness, and to plaster 
Arms, their cemented fists unbroken
By human touch, leaves the bowl’s howl
Always already sounding into the darkness.
 

7.
 
The table concludes that everyone in  the world
Is either a mandolin, a bowl,
Green fruit, or a plaster arm.
 
Listen how the materials of your own making
Pulse dark rhythms in your ears.
Succumb to the lullaby
 
 Of their speaking, know that you too perch
 On a table where a cloth swaddles
And stifles you.

“Fantasia on Picasso’s ‘Mandolin, Fruit Bowl, and Plaster Arm’ (1925)” is by Trenton H. Copyright © 2007 by Trenton H. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.