The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem LOVE AND BEAUTY

My mother loved my breasts, comparing them
to those of Aphrodite
in the painting The Birth of Venus.
She loved them so much we traveled
to the Uffizi,
where I wore a gray cardigan over a white cotton blouse,
in the stifling summer heat,
to conceal my twelve-year-old chest
that had recently gone rogue,
from fat to full, from nipple to breast,
about which I felt nothing but disgust.
We didn’t actually travel to Florence
because of my breasts.

But because—
because peeling beets and potatoes
in a knotty pine kitchen in a Dutch Colonial house
inevitably gave my mother wanderlust.
Still, it wasn’t until years later that I thought to ask,
Why did you insist
we share a bath, despite my protests?
Her response,
To save water
for the other guests,
might have been honest. This is something
I think about from time to time, the way that one thinks
the unthinkable.

THE HONEYWAGONS

Give me an eternity of this:
huddled close to you
at a small town parade
as shivering cheerleaders
lob suckers at us
from flatbed trailers.
The wrapper says
MYSTERY FLAVOR
and the mystery is how
it all turned out so well.
My cheek pouched out
with hard sugar,
I suspect blue raspberry,
as impossible as Santa
waving from the backseat
of a Cutlass convertible.
I know I don’t deserve
this—not the rain of candy,
not your love reflected
in the slow rotation
of chrome spokes,
but I am happy to roll
the sweetness of each
on my tongue. We are made
clean here, as clean
as the honeywagons
coming down the street—
their tanks scrubbed
for grand procession,
their cabins waxed
to gleam in the low sun,
a wreath and velvet ribbon
wired to each pristine grill.
Here they come! Sweetheart,
I know I am full of it,
but something redeeming
is almost here. Here it comes.

The Amon Liner Poetry Prize Poem THE BRIDGE IN SUMMER

I come to watch the warpaint shiners swim—
             minnows with red-tinged fins tunnel

through a biting current. Downstream, children
             swing off a rope, trusting the river

to break their fall. It’s hard to have so much faith—
             I pause before the cable-bridge, wondering

if I should cross this chasm of stones.
             I can feel the weight of my body—

humidity lingers on my skin, a reminder
             of days when school was out

and I spent hours in my room, brushing rough canvas
             while the house filled with whispers.

I had few expectations then—only that I might rupture
             like a dam. I painted my dreams

in watercolor, closed my eyes, listened to my breath,
             at first unsteady. I understand the balance

underwater, where the fish must know
             how to get home, to safety.

At the suspension bridge, my hands scrape wire—
             I find my footing on wood that trembles.

I am learning to carry my heaviness—
             knowing, somehow, the bridge will hold.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem LOVING A MAN AND HIS KIDS AND HIS HOUSE

The parade-roller-coaster-hijinks-
high-kicks-slapstick-show of kids—
your kids, becoming
something like mine, as well.

How close should I hold
them? What will stay?
What will be taken
away? The kids
are never still.
Neither am I.
Neither are we.

Snare drum of dryer and tickle
of zipper going ’round.
I sit seeing if I can
become all house,
can reach peace
with the plumbing, vents, and lofty
operations of this whole rigmarole.

I am becoming woman
of the dishrag, the countertop, the shower.
I am wife-ing the damn house:
tending to her, giving
each careful ministration like a nurse
over a sick bed. I pledge:
We will keep each other safe and clean.
We will keep proper functioning.

If this were a cave,
I would festoon it with honeysuckle
and thick garlands of magnolia blossoms.

If this were the belly of a whale,
I would light candles and read the shadows.

If this were a cockpit,
I’d learn fast how to fly.

This is a house.
I am a woman grown harder
through toil and dedication. Making
it work. Sweating my equity
into every floor board, skinned
knee, illness, frustration, dishes, stitches,
and fits almost blowing the house down.

Under the weight
(an anvil shoved
into the ribcage)
of loving too hard,
I must remember:
Do not confuse Eden
with a really nice rest stop
off I-40, though the space
it offers away
from them all
(the man, the kids, the house)
might beckon and beseech me,
by how green the grass grows.

SHAKESPEARE ON MARS

To be the first to play a Martian Hamlet,
To blow red dust off Yorick’s ancient skull,
Exclaim to steadfast Opportunity, 
Over Ophelia drowned in Lowell’s canal—

I dreamed this future vividly enough
It’s a memory. It will not come to pass. 
I am a booster stage, a corner crier
Beckoning groundlings to the Marscrete O.

As I hand you the playbill, look into my eyes
And there will be an ocean uncrossed and a life
Raft empty except its unused flare gun.

Inside this helmet of my skull, I hear rain, 
Though nothing’s fallen for months. It’s only
Dry earth and imaginary tragedies.

The Amon Liner Poetry Prize Poem WE ARE ALL STARVED FOR TOUCH

On West Richardson Street, 
kids threw rocks at the pavement
until they chipped, then threw the shards
at each other. Their momma called
them in for dinner, named the dish
after a bold story, named it “How you think
you got here?” The purple and yellow
of their father’s bandana
swayed above the sweat
on her brow that night. Little dust
tornadoes followed the kids home;
small things always fake importance 
here. But if you walk through the baby 
twisters, your eyes are the only parts 
of your body that feel the dirt. 
One of the kids told a story at dinner: 
a man walked through a car wash
and let the hundreds of fluffy fingers
slap his body again and again.

GROWING OLD IN THE SOUTH

It’s true, you get so dumb and bald
that young folks try disowning you
(and soon the old folks also keep away),
so violently ornery that news has no effect,
inoculated as you are to fact
by narrative that’s more compelling than the truth:
you move to Florida. You vote against school funding.
The nights before you go to church,
you set your best clothes out,
you fix the hairs on your toupee with hairspray.
It’s not that you can’t see the jowls,
how gravity has loosened them 
into an unremitting grimace—but—
it’s hard to clock the aging day by day.
You carry in your head a florid image
of muscled youth, the time you played
guitar for swooning girls out on the pier,
but passers-by remark upon your gray,
the hairs inside your ears, the coming stench
of surrender, which perfumes you, smells 
like apples too long in a grove, like sandalwood 
but sour, the same smell as money 
when it changes hands too many times, 
the bills worn out, the coin impossibly tarnished.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem PIG THERAPIST

I find myself with a wide prospect of Iowa.
Everything here is easy
to say, difficult to imagine. A horizon
of corn that tastes like yellow
wallpaper, and such are the reeds
around lakes of excrement. I’m crying
at the beauty, the fertile smells, the fields
of dreams. Below, there is a pilgrimage
of pigs, from their galaxy of mud
to the consigning hug of thick metal
bars and the veiled entrance
of whatever may come. My beautiful view
is shaded by pig tears, sobs shaking
my green expanse, so I come down
to the march, take my place in their pens,
by their sides, and begin to console,
offer a sermon for their unchosen end.
Touch each crusted hoof.
We cannot blame others for their
wants, their needs. Nuzzle each
wet snout. We can find meaning in
purpose. Run fingers through
hairs on each chin. All we get to
choose is how we respond. I find
I am pretty good at preparing pigs
for death, and they are quiet while
plodding toward their short futures.
I never return to my life. This job smells
too sweet. Listen: all grunting stops,
there is only the sizzle of sun on
pink backs.

THRESHOLD DAYS

Eight hundred years before I tried to kill myself, Galileo studies
    stars—a near-invisible rendezvous.
No telescope in his hand, a chin lifted to the sky and two planets
    traveling together. I can’t be sure if it’s time
that slows down or my attention. Either way, I never refuse an
    invitation from my deepest dark. In my telling,
Galileo writes double-bright down in his notebook, forgets the
    word phenomenon. Here, I recite my inertia—
my lonely invention caught between pilot light and carpet.
    Jupiter and Saturn—a mismatch,
a gaseous incongruity. But in their tracing of the sun, a map to
    keep eyes open. Galileo writes coded letters,
cursive attempts at being noticed and misunderstood.
    And when I discovered how luxurious
my suffering could feel, I understood why we hold revelations
    between our palms—
so we can better keep it for ourselves. Isn’t every word
    written an attempt to outlive ourselves,
to pull closer distant objects? The sky’s dreamblue—
    craters and spirals
and the secrets we place at the center of refusal. Never once
    does Galileo take for granted
the imperfect dancing of satellites. His only instructions—
    how to survive looking backward.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award PILE OF MAGGOTS

It’s a game the newsboys play: a wrestling match
accordioned up to black sky. A smokestack of boys,
one making a ladder of the others. They’re scrappy
& stalagmited, some small as newsprint, smelling of sweat.
A Jenga tower of bravado & Bowery accents. One boy’s
head emerging between another’s knee-pit; one boy
under the rubble with his arms stretched like a searchlight;
one boy at the top until his competitors, like the meat
surrounding a peachpit, bury him. The game ends
when the youngest calls out, Fellas! Please! & they
flatten themselves boy-shaped again—giggling into each other.
I daydream myself fourteen, with a flat cap, ready to tether
my new fists to the nearest mirrored body. A boy abomination
emerging from other boys like limbs of a good, clumsy angel.