| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
PICTURES OF THE BISTI
Terry Lucas
(About Poetry Forum)
How her best friend, Kip, who was her lover
just that one time on the bus trip
their senior year in college, blanket
in the back seat, under four corners
moon, somewhere in New Mexico
between the Bisti Badlands and Angel Peak,
told her-
“When you're drunk, the shutter is wide open,
the F-number is bigger
than the weight of two brains combined,
but there’s no film in the camera
and who’s to say what love is
when captured?”
How she’d seen pictures
of one-armed grooms with torn satin lapels
curled up inside Jerry Falwell
Old Time Gospel Bibles, ripped apart by in-laws
from white taffeta gowns, grand
children floating in the air, holding balls
of white-out between their legs, bodiless
arms lifting them up on ponies, giraffes, leaping
goats, horse-head barber chairs,
sea monsters with double tails-an offering
of saddles and blankets of wood
on a carousel of matched pairs.
How she still drank wild
photons that left no tracks,
still rode the soft blanket
of unopened love.
Judge John Poch’s comment: “This poem is surprising in that we are well into the poem (7 or 8 lines) when the poem starts to move away from the narrative-as-usual into a more surreal and difficult conversation/imagination. The last stanza reins the two central stanzas back in by the end, but not enough for me. The images remain a little druggy and less than compelling, and I wish the poem should be more thoroughly narrative. How to make sense of those one-armed grooms or the white-out? A poem doesn’t have to make sense, but neither does it have to be so non-committal. Everyone’s got their own compass setting on that issue.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
Honorable Mentions, April 2004
