by Angela Sorby
and undergrowth “for mystery.”
Olmsted said scenery
“unbends the mind,”
but what then? Unbent,
trees gather and store
the sun. Unbent, space grows
larger than any one thought, or feeling:
always this tossing,
always this retrieving.
Fat
It is not the look but the act
of overflowing that attracts:
this falling out of an XXL shirt,
over the edge of the Rascal
scooter at Piggly Wiggly,
this turning a corner
into the snack aisle,
bearing the impossible
burden of the body,
how fat folds conceal
a rib cage identical
to the cage inside
the U.S. president
since no one’s exempt
from the urge
to enlarge into eternity,
like the heads at Mt. Rushmore,
or the Statue of Liberty,
to extend the self beyond
its airplane seat,
into the space of strangers,
into discomfiting touching,
to gorge on sleeve after sleeve
of cookies, each stamped
OREO, starting and ending
with the same letter O,
seductive and circular as the wheels
Ezekiel saw and instantly
craved so intensely
he thought they were part of his soul.
Sacred Grove
David Shields appears
on PBS to proclaim
the death of the novel,
but I always knew
the library was a repository
of corpses. By third
grade their silence
attracted: so pasty, so inky,
so compliantly unreal,
so unlike the reconstituted
orange juice smell
that took dominion
over us children,
recalling our obligation
to grow, to thrive, to speak.
The novel, bloodless
and cadaverous,
could keep secrets
grave-deep,
which is why it’s tempting
to worship trees:
so many pages,
poised to leap,
like Daphne,
from sap to text—
the second-best kind
of little death.
Go-Between
i.
Just before it died,
their marriage went to Madeleine Island
with me, their third-wheel friend.
Why does beautiful weather
have no shame,
like a ukulele at an execution?
At dusk we drank at Tom’s Burned-Down Café,
a tent stretched over ashes.
Was it a psilocybin flashback
that made me think I could coax them together,
like God if God were God?
We drained our pints.
The sun set, though I whispered pause—
Down, down it went,
metabolized by night.
ii.
Terrance McKenna, the ex-
hippie ethnobotanist,
says mushrooms
are the earth’s way
of conversing with human brains,
but we are deaf,
made too sad by sadness, too joyful
by joy. Whatever the fungal shibboleth,
we’re sitting here still
at Tom’s Burned-Down Café,
missing everything.
Sofia’s Stove
A nineteenth-century Norwegian stove,
tall and ornate, forces heat
through my friend’s villa
in Hamar. It’s hard to let
her have her stove,
because I’ve been cold
since 1979.
I want to screech That stove
is rightfully mine!
Still it sits in Norway
as winter enters the Western hemisphere
gently, like a sister,
through the unlatched door.
January spreads quickly,
the way life flattens into a broad field
of snow: we are old in our mittens.
Even our cats know.
Sofia, friend, I allow you your stove,
the one you earned
and deserve. Our fortunes curve inward
like our toenails—once supple,
now brittle. It’s best to stand
a little apart from the fire.
The stove assembles itself,
not in real time but in the warm
intervals between women,
the place where we can’t meet,
where strawberries redden and stay
impossibly sweet.
The Second Daguerreotype
of Emily Dickinson, Amherst College Library Special Collections, 2012
Her teacher,
Edward Hitchcock,
took plaster casts
of Amherst’s dinosaur tracks,
but could not reconstruct
their musculature,
how they moved when Massachusetts
was steamy, newly broken
off Pangaea, and yet
in Dickinson’s photo
a shape is visible under her dress:
not America,
but an older landmass,
its theropods killed by a comet,
flood, or volcano. Then
came the pressure
that turned organic matter
into coal. She clearly
knew an occult route back
to those astonished
condensed creatures
fueling her planetary
distribution: inky, glittery carbon
no longer exchanging
atoms with oxygen.
How strange, how alien
to be both an energy source
and a burner. She’s not quite human
to us. We’re not quite human
to her,
but there are two women
in the picture. No wonder
she presses her hand
hard against Kate Scott Turner’s
spine, as if to say We were friends
in real time, which matters more than poetry,
because it leaves no trace. The print
is not the finger. The paper
is not the face.
Epistle
Sylvia Plath, Bad Mom,
we love how you wet
no towels for us,
your readers. You turned on
the gas and let it run
into the vast unwholesome system
of English 101:
that’s where we found you,
curled in the Norton,
and you said: Hello,
and we said: Mom.
How you hated that!
How un-sexy
to be Mom to so many
perfectly sane young
tattooed women wondering
Am I crazy?
Still you smiled
yourself blurry,
modeling swimwear
in the student paper,
giving us your all.
And we took it.
The Suburban Mysteries
after H.D.
Begonias lashed
to stakes still fall,
crushed by the weight
of storms so light
they travel miles
above the turf.
Damage is reason-
proof: a spine compresses
in a dream,
and the dream’s daughter
can’t walk it off.
She’s shorter
by a fraction.
There are eyes
in the begonias,
eyes in the thunder,
eyes controlling
the children’s limbic reactions.
Have you seen me?
O to stare from a milk carton,
gone through fields
too dark to farm,
into the old forest’s old
dissolving arms.
The Sleeve Waves
The pigeon-catchers come out to catch—
wait for it—
yes—
pigeons. They use a net
& a rusty cat carrier.
A pigeon’ll fetch
“three dollars on the open market,”
says the older catcher.
The younger catcher, with dyed black hair,
says nothing. He looks
like he thinks about pigeons
all day. His eyes have turned
white & grey,
& they’ve flown away.
Sivka-Burka
Sleep’s smashed
to shards. Lap-
tops glow in bed after bed.
Strangers pull strangers
into their heads. And yet,
as starlings scatter,
unwired Russian grandmothers
strip to drink
what’s left of the sun
after the death of Stalin,
and the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
No one pays attention
to these women but themselves,
as they harvest
vitamin D directly,
laying out a foil sheet
and roasting.
Slowly, they turn
tree-bark brown,
not to please their husbands,
but just to absorb
something profound
without reading.
The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry
Ronald Wallace, General Editor
Now We’re Getting Somewhere • David Clewell
Henry Taylor, Judge, 1994
The Legend of Light • Bob Hicok
Carolyn Kizer, Judge, 1995
Fragments in Us: Recent and Earlier Poems • Dennis Trudell
Philip Levine, Judge, 1996
Don’t Explain • Betsy Sholl
Rita Dove, Judge, 1997
Mrs. Dumpty • Chana Bloch
Donald Hall, Judge, 1998
Liver • Charles Harper Webb
Robert Bly, Judge, 1999
Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991–1994 • Derick Burleson
Alicia Ostriker, Judge, 2000
Borrowed Dress • Cathy Colman
Mark Doty, Judge, 2001
Ripe • Roy Jacobstein
Edward Hirsch, Judge, 2002
The Year We Studied Women • Bruce Snider
Kelly Cherry, Judge, 2003
A Sail to Great Island • Alan Feldman
Carl Dennis, Judge, 2004
Funny • Jennifer Michael Hecht
Billy Collins, Judge, 2005
Reunion • Fleda Brown
Linda Gregerson, Judge, 2007
The Royal Baker’s Daughter • Barbara Goldberg
David St. John, Judge, 2008
Falling Brick Kills Local Man • Mark Kraushaar
Marilyn Nelson, Judge, 2009
The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House • Nick Lantz
Robert Pinsky, Judge, 2010
Last Seen • Jacqueline Jones LaMon
Cornelius Eady, Judge, 2011
Voodoo Inverso • Mark Wagenaar
Jean Valentine, Judge, 2012
About Crows • Craig Blais
Terrance Hayes, 2013
The Sleeve Waves • Angela Sorby
Naomi Shihab Nye, Judge, 2014
