2012 Contest Winner

Available May 30, 2013

If They Have Ears to Hear

by Terry Lucas

"1967"
After Larry Levis

I hear it mostly in the deep
guttural tailpipes of Fords & Chevys
revving out of a Friday afternoon
high school parking lot in a small New Mexican desert
town--Sunset Avenue pulsing
like a neck vein that leads to the heart
of downtown, where Main Street pumps cars all night
stop light to stop light between the A&W
and the Tasty-Freeze, engines overheating
then finally boiling over in ice-patched two a.m.
driveways, cooling down with the ticking sounds
of shrinking metal, re-buckling of belts, re-hooking of bras.

I'd like to talk to the boys behind the wheels,
the girls curled up on humps between bucket seats;
I'd like to tell them there is nothing out here
in two thousand twelve except what they bring with them,
how they should climb out and start packing--
the juniper's needle-leaves, never pressed
between pages of a Bible, the scorpion's breath
exhaled through abdominal stigmata, sand swept
from sagebrush roots, lifted by the twisting fist of a dust devil,
all collecting in luggaged silence--I'd like to tell them

how there will always be enough falling
brimstone, lakes of fire, flaming bushes,
wilted flowers, how there will always be enough gods
to punish them for putting their tongues to the warm clay,
to turn them to salt for glancing back while walking away,
how, when asked "where are you?" "what have you done?"
"who told you that you were naked?" what they will need most
will be to learn to love the questions.

Character Readings

by Bern Mulvey

An excerpt from "Cleaning Up"

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Always After Our Fall

by Jessicca Daigle

An excerpt from "As If the Body Could Forget"

It began slowly, with her

asking What day is it again?

forgetting where she put her house key,

occasionally getting that confused look

when spoken to. So it seems easy

to understand why no one noticed the times

my grandmother put her heart medication

with the cheese, or wore her slippers to work,

chalking it all up to exhaustion or comfort.

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What Has Not Yet Left

by James Crews

An excerpt taken from the poem "The Arsonist's Wife Has Not Yet Left Him"

Nothing left to live for, the man told the reporters

and all of us, his neighbors, gathered around him.

He brushed ash from his face and looked back

at the bare, wet-black rafters of his new house

still smoking. You never forget this, he said, wiping

at the lines dragging soot down both cheeks.

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Chapbook, $6
ISBN 13: 978-0-9822489-7-3

In the Little House

by Jenn Habel

"There are books that leave us, once we have turned the last page, with a soft, clear tone that overrides ideas or emotional impressions. It is the music of grief and desire, when grief and desire have become indistinguishably joined. Jenn Habel's In the Little House is such a collection. 'No one told me it would be so impersonal . . .' says its speaker, 'my charge/ to be her globe, then station, / then something in a warm wind. . .' How beautiful a book that so embodies its subject matter, an emptiness from which children are born and poems imagined. How difficult a resolution to release a child in small increments, a world whose loveliness can only move continuously away. Habel's poems are the little houses of that world: in which first memories and first words are right now being made."
                —David Keplinger

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Chapbook, $6
ISBN 13: 978-0-9798714-81

Back of the Envelope

by Greg McBride

From Okinawa to Vietnam to the marital bed, these poems pack a punch—and a caress. Military and domestic battlegrounds are viewed close up, through the unsparing eye of a photographer. And yet these poems fairly bristle with restrained emotion. These are decent, honorable poems, and under them all is a fine music that makes the grief more bearable."

                —Barbara Goldberg

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Chapbook, $6
 ISBN: 978-0-9798714-98

Two Sides of the Same Thing

by Matthew Nienow

"With 'dark swollen words and shifting air,' Matthew Nienow builds poems as if building boats, 'each strip like a tree's growth,' and 'asking the question rivers are always asking: why?' From Nienow I am grateful to have learned that poetry 'is movement with one desire: to pull at whatever it touches.' There is much talk these days of the importance of a poet's voice. But here we have proof that a poet's ear…for music, for complexity, for 'the prodigal aria returning home'…is just as important."

                —Todd Boss

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Chapbook, $6
ISBN: 978-0-9798714-29