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FIRST PRIZE
AGORAPHOBIA
by Lisa Rosen
Because I am faithful to borders
you think my life is small––a sad
stump
of its initial flowering.
But listen, I’ve made a pact
with my patch of home
and here is world
enough to love.
Once in the long dusk of summer,
I put my lips close to the earth and said
If you
are my portion, I’ll receive you like a prize.
Blue heron by the water,
dark fir cones of the woods,
stories
of belonging that fit
like parables in my heart.
At night if I dream
of far away weathers,
of
shellfish and pearls
or sun glinting
on golden pagodas,
who can say my world
isn’t broadened
by journeying?
When I touch the air and feel the prayers
that mingle there, I know how many
ways
there are to be grounded,
and linked with others in longing,
I forgive myself for being stranded.
I
can sleep, trusting the infinite
inventory of tomorrow, and wake
satisfied as grass
that lives beside
a stream.
SECOND PRIZE
CROSSING
by Becky Dennison
Sakellariou
After an installation by Kalliope Lemos, 2006
Every
year, thousands of desperate Iraqis, Somalis, Pakistanis, Kurds and Afghanis
walk hundreds of kilometers overland to
reach the western coast of Turkey where
they hope to find a boat in which to cross over to Greece. The boats are wooden,
old and leaking. The traffikers travel in speedboats alongside them until they reach Greek waters. They then try to sink the
boats so that the Greek Coast Guard will pick up the migrants as they are required to do by law. If they are picked up in
the water, they cannot be returned to Turkey. Many of them drown and many are rescued.
I found the boats rotting,
scattered
across the night beach of Inoussa.
Twenty six of them, hollow
of human form, abandoned to the darkened sand,
the
wind, the salt.
Their occupants had fled to the hills, terror
in their mouths, their children
swaddled
across their bellies,
shaken to silence, always thirsty.
Oh
Mother my home
I cannot see you as we wake
in the morning, comfort
my skin with your hands, how
will
I know
when to stop remembering
A woman in black sees them,
shouts, they crouch
in unknown
grass that smells
of trees, sounds pierce
their skin, thorns
fill the sand beneath their feet.
They
lie speechless, their tongues forced
to know nothing, their throats
to swallow hard bread soaked in salt and
oil.
Oh God please
take me, my baby
I bleed,
my skirts pulled up
through my legs, the smell of fish
stashed between the curved wooden planks,
their
scales like lightning on the blue
I will gather these ships, split
into halves, broken
by fear
and a long sea, built
by men who knew
the darkness of the other moon.
I will lift them into a temple
of
voices thrown across nations,
a cathedral to the aching
spirit, yellow deserts of running
human shadows,
outlines against the night
sky, despair and hope
spliced through the ribs, one breath
rising hard after
the other.
Dedicated to:
Jaleb
b.1979,
Mohammed b. 79,
Abdullaha b. 60,
Kaea b. 78,
Ibrahim b. 69,
Motha b. 81,
Firas
b. 90,
Hassen b. 82,
Ali b. 82,
Said b. 86,
Bahar b. 77,
Damba b. 65,
Habib b. 76,
Hossein
b. 86,
Wassim b. 79,
Mozde b. 96,
Amor b. 86,
Brahim b. 84,
Moustapha b. 81,
Adel
b. 86,
Ahmed b. 88,
Sarah b. 87,
Goulan b. 80
and hundreds and hundreds more.
THIRD PRIZE
TRAVELLING NORTH
by Becky Dennison Sakellariou
I have suddenly become serious.
I no longer write of betrayal.
Instead,
I travel north
through clear pond country, south
toward almond trees
that line the inland sea.
I
breathe in the calling clouds,
my lungs lined with white, blue,
two landscapes dug into the jigsaw
of
my bones.
The water’s curve brings relief,
the grove, a gasp of edged shadows.
I have suddenly
become serious.
I no longer go down on my knees
searching the dark
for something resembling love.
You
will not be there, you who swore
that our souls were bound forever
but who wouldn’t walk out
into
the truth.
You will instead be curled
over your folded knees, numb
and forgotten, love
just
some letters
placed side by side
like your wide freckled hands
limp on your thighs.
I have
suddenly become serious.
How is it
that we just arrive
and then just depart?
I no longer watch
myself
as I undress,
nor think
of my body as anyone else’s.
I stand by the sea, naked,
looking
out onto an unmapped land
without longitude.
Sometimes it takes a great hand
to carry us back to
life.
Sometimes it takes a great sound
to pull us into the light.
In Crete, they say
that you
can hear
the smells of wild onion
and mountain sage.
FOURTH PRIZE
HER TURN IN THE DESERT
by Ginny Lowe Connors
Mud and straw––the walls
of her new home. Humble like the earth.
She’d rub her hand along a wall, feeling
the idea of ancestors, though her own
lived green lives among trees.
Wind and sky,
that’s what she needed,
dry heat soaking into the skin,
the light so harsh
it could sear logic right out.
To be scorched clean
of all that had cluttered her life, to find
the burning center––these were her reasons
for coming here. The desert was rock
and shattered rock. It suited her.
Because her heart clamored so,
she needed emptiness,
the balm of it.
She’d walk east at sundown and see
sometimes a purple band
rising form the horizon, separating
from all that is rooted, vanishing
from view. She walked
and the earth turned until its shadow,
a great dark halo, flew off.
Is that how love goes,
she wondered, like a great wing
that rises away and dissolves
into sky, leaving
and returning, leaving again?
HONORABLE MENTION
LAST DAYS
by Susanna Lang
The trees have not lost their leaves
but their density, and the city
fills
with light, migrating birds
flashing the white of their underwings,
new foil streamers above the used
car
lots. Two women walk down
the street, wrapped in their mothers’
robes, in their grandmothers’ stories,
carrying
groceries in white plastic bags
balanced on their heads. Their spines
are as rooted and pliant as trees,
their
veils a brighter red than the maples.
They turn a corner towards a hidden door,
a table where they can set
their bags,
two chairs where they can rest, surrounded
by the cries of too many children,
the clatter
of trains running too close
to their walls, the staticky wires
that run between this place and the place
where
their mothers and grandmothers
taught them to carry their burdens
lightly, and with grace to the end.
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