| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
WINDOW
Michael Snyder
(Writer’s Block)
My mother called it the lens of hate
the day of the swastika
tacked across the two-car
garage door of the Beckers
vacationing away at Myrtle Beach.
She held me like a last breath,
squeezing my chest so tight
my heart couldn’t have been any bigger
than a freckle. As the banner
billowed like a spreading rash
she recited the story of the tall boy
with his basketball who disappeared
into the end of a day outside a different
window long ago, a time she fancied
herself well wearing gingham
and modest skirts. She’d put her hands
over her eyes, as she did mine now,
wondering aloud which stars
marked his birth, how
in the twilight his tennis shoes
glowed like twin moons,
what war he would draft into,
how the first color of every night
seemed a shade of bullet,
and about the steady orange metronome
beating up and down, up and down,
no shot in sight.
Judge David Hernandez’s comments: “Four couplets down, the narrator says: ‘my heart couldn’t have been any
bigger than a freckle.’ But once you finish reading this poem, you’ll know that’s not the case. Imagine a heart big as the moon.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
Honorable Mentions, December 2004
