Wild Poems Single Poem Contest 2020

First Prize:
Tammy Armstrong

Lady Hurricane
Perhaps she cures by sympathy
cold griefs of the head
and stays the inflammation the lurcher winds kick up.

Or maybe she’s man-shaped, man-voiced
a Helio-Arkite superstition
a metempsychosis of a Little King of Everything
or a symbolic account of the Flood
that bloats and drowns elsewhere before rushing here—
            her waters dark as blue can get before becoming black
as the uprights of a forest
burned down for pastureland, for timber
for fuel to make vodka and glass.

From the east
she brings New England’s salts and winds
the Gulf of Maine’s shifting fogs      
and something Floridian like eucalyptus and wetted-down dust
and at dusk, when I think of you most         
and the isopleths we share
her greeny air swamps every porous thing:
barachois ponds, the home scars of limpids on barnacled rock
and creeping Charlie, cat’s foot, gill-go-by-ground, and turn hoof
thicketing beneath the porch steps, under-known.

*

Dawn and the light catches in the orb spider’s night work
her hexafoil crocheted into the willow withes
and here are the banes~ castor, dog’s teeth amulets, lightning
devil’s backbone, alligator plant, mother of thousands

and here are her sweeps—Lady Hurricane
coatless, lambent
her clouds like boneless sharks
and her selvedge, her self-finished hems
snagging on the ox-eye daisies
the fever plant and spirit spoon
while her winds trough up the shag pines’ tertiaries
and lift them by their crooked feet.

We can hear her frosts working in the bark
while she dead-heads the trees, heavy with ugly fruit                                   
or wraps her daughters in donkey skins
          or tilts the light
or drags the tides for drift junk and marine oil
or floods the trenches
dug from chalk with the shoulder blades of cattle.
In the shallows: the coot and shag haunts
a life-long thing—zodiacal.

*

Even tonight—
a slantwise shifting around
our cottage’s birds-mouth rafters
and she comes to the edges:
the night’s blind waters         
where the lighthouse’s carotene eye gives way
to its chantless, cotton-mouthed call.

My room is your room, here in the attic
where the roof slants low near the bricked-off chimney
where the forgotten night-light waits out the rain.
Too alone in our sleep
the meaning-unmeaning inside our dreams
we’ll keep the window half-open again
to rat-eyed light and wrecking wind
and rivers shallowing to mud.

Second:

Sue Finch

Flamingo

after Liz Berry

The night she bent my elbows to fit the candy floss cardigan
for the twenty-third time, my limbs turned to wings.
She wished me to be a pink girl.

My neck grew and grew,
elongating, extending.
Black eyes, shrunk in the pink like submerged pea shingle.

Light in my fans of feathers
I was lifted like a balloon puffed with helium.
Body and wings held stately,
magically anchored by one leg.
Miniature rough patellas marked my hinges.

When the scent entered half-moon holes in my new beak
I could have salivated at the raw rip of scaled flesh.
But my juices would not run – I was gizzard now.
I couldn’t bear the confinement of the flock but flight
had me fearful.

Passing through flamingo phase I fattened, darkened.
A birch broom in a fit,
I shook my thick cheeks side to side
became a dodo;
with a waddle in my walk that slowed.

She sent my father then. He came alone
with gun and incongruent grin
and shot me dead.
Skewered me above his heaped fire under moonlight,
turned me slowly round and round.

Third:

I. Patterson

Fenland Water Village

dig down deep into the wet dark
soil dig further down further

erect a white tent held tight at each
corner over the crime scene

dig further join the archaeologists’
scrum scrape away roots dead

and living pull away stones dig an
oblong trench for insistent water to

creep and lie in brush away dirt reveal
a cartwheel of house-struts more than

one each shaped timber burned to
the bone brush and blow further find

beads without string soft glint of
bronze bowls hold them intact with

their incinerated grain piece together
the people world dig further down

lift out whispers of cloth thin and fine
find at last a bronze blade thumb

its sides clean see its nearly new
shine its beaten edge will still cut you

after this time climb the ladder from
silence to silence brush soil from

your fingers the late sky’s wide and
still reeds touch lean bend the water’s

a mirror see perfect copy of sky
reeds your silhouette sharp in the fen