Honorable Mention, Poetry Contest I peered into a puddle and saw the sky, as if I had lain on the pavement and looked up through the spreading fingers of the trees. Gazing into the sheen of the sidewalk, I watched the heavens and saw them tremble at my passing. Emily Summerhays lives in New York [...]
Contest Honorees, Poetry, Summer 2008
Augury
by Emily Summerhays
Falls, Gardens, Deaths
by Adam Greenwood
HE SAYS IN NEW MEXICO the weeks before Thanksgiving are High Fall, autumn in abundance, all bright colors and fruits. Thanksgiving is the high point of that season, and also its end. Then it’s whooping crane season, Christmas, and winter. In the weeks before Thanksgiving the cottonwood leaves turned bright pumpkin yellow. We were driving along [...]
Evening Comes to Donner Lake
by Cheri Schulzke
air cools. rich, lucent blue ripples, flaxen with slanted sunlight. canoe slips through narrow pine-shadowed inlet, nuzzles coarse sand. jumbled cargo awaits— remnants of play. laughter fades sun-weary, content. sandcastles sag as little waves greet one small stray shovel. suntips slide behind the alp. wind stops. the lake rests silent as glass. In her previous [...]
Who We Are
by Lisa Meadows Garfield
Dawn cracks open the shell of night, leaks light into far corners of hard hearts, reveals hope waiting like a trusting child. The earth exhales, blows fog and darkness back into the black night, inhales new air, faith as fresh as rain in summer. I memorize the map of stars disappearing overhead. They remain in [...]
Northern Torches
by Ruth Harris Swaner
Whistling, rustling, crackling sounds, frost-hardened snow of the heaven: Eskimos believe torches guide spirits journeying to the next life. Dark, far away, I see the sky open. A haze settles into a glow, gradually widening, striping the earth. Twisting contortions of mysterious light surround me. Fissures of red, white, gold, shine yellow, like glowing irons [...]
Gather
by Johnna Cornett
I would basket the fruit for you, from hidden houses behind leaves and far boughs. High on a tripod ladder, I reach, and catalogue the fruit with ants and roots and the mountain behind, note the girth of the trunk and the aguapunctual movement of water. You drift like clouds, and boughs that bend under [...]
Cold Crisp Sky
by Leah Anderson
cold crisp sky grey, grey concrete In other seasons, when the grass is still bright green and the trees’ colors command attention and the flowers roll out of the ground, the concrete grey doesn”t seem so prominent, doesn’t shout so loud. But here, from behind these tinted windows, the concrete is the same shade of [...]