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InterBoard Poetry Competition
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Honorable Mentions, June 2007
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RHYTHMICALLY INAPPOSITE
      Michael McRandall
      (Pen Shells)

Lana rides a pony in the
cellar
unmindful of the children
who dance circles at the
door --
she wonders if the apathy
is terminal,
or merely, chronic,
but decides it doesn’t matter
since the colors fade
regardless of the
song.

Neighbors stand in line to borrow
vapors
which serve to cover shadows
that have melted on the
floor --
plant roses in her window-box
and water them with undiluted
inference,
Then watch through shuttered
windows
as she finger-paints a
mourning on the
sky.

Lana makes an early trip to
vacant --
where every mother Mary
emulates their father’s
whore --
and withers at the
elementary portrait that is
drowning in the rearview,
as crack-pipes play
a reverential etude to a
fractured morning
buzz.
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56° AND SUNNY
      Mitchell Geller
      (About Poetry Forum)

I concentrated far too much on death,
    and somehow missed the violet and the crocus,
and sharp green shoots that sucked the sun like breath.
    I concentrated far too much on death;
ignored the rose, or some such shibboleth –
    let pure, prismatic joy escape my focus.
I concentrated far too much on death,
    and somehow missed the violet and the crocus.
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RAPUNZEL AT 49 LEARNS TO DANCE THE TARANTELLA
      Laurie Byro
      (Desert Moon Review)

Because she was awkward,
the opposite of a spun-sugar baby, a black
widow in his glittering
web, because
she never understood about Dylan
and Baez and how she stood out like the purple eye
in the delicacy of his Queen Anne’s Lace
chords, he the pearl shell, the mother
of the luminous lake pearl
and because she thought his book was Tarantella,
never ever understood--

pushed up against it like a train heading
into snowy Hibbing with those Russian wolves
howling outside her window
and she breathing the blast
of coal smoke and exhaling strings
of sweet gas, the floss of cotton candy,
she rubs against his arm like a spotting
cat, noticing the dark whorls of hair, the eight-legged
slip into tyranny.

Her taut, tight controlled body
just the way he likes it, zippered inside
itself, a dance towards his white light, a six pointed
star, not cocaine white or holy but because
he was the teacher and she the pupil
and because she slips inside his
skin, minds the illumination
of his ghost preacher
in and out and in
and out and through his incarnations
and because
her skin has begun to peel, to shed off
into a pile of sawdust
he blows her onto the floor where she becomes
the grit under all the fancy soles.
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SONGS FROM STEPHEN KING’S KNAPSACK III: INSOMNIA
      Gary Blankenship
      (Blue Line)

Trees don’t sleep, although some sit up in bed
and pretend. They might even nod off
for a cat-nap, but you never catch them
in the depths of REM sleep where dreams come from.

Some undress preferring to spend the long night
nude, nothing between them and the damp fog
but some ragged shreds of moss and lichen.
Others stay clothed as they watch the moon change

from sickle to an old man eye winking.
Come day, they yawn and nests fall from great heights.

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About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
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