| Third Place: Heather Bell |
 © Damir Alter Matijevic Natural Resources read by jonathan lu I'm walking behind my mother's house and a little boy runs up to me. He asks me if I have seen his rock dove. From out of his pocket he takes a dead bird and there is blood on his hands. He tells me that if he could throw his voice, he would allow me to catch it on the trajectory. I remember my father saying something similar once and I begin to wonder if this is my dead father. The little boy asks me why I stole his time machine. He has put away the bird, I guess, and is playing a tree as if it were a violin. He asks me if I love him and I reply Moles Zr = 36 g / 91.224 = 0.395 => 0.395 moles of Rh Mass Rh = 0.395 mol x 102.906 g/mol = 40.6g and he laughs because he knows we are both my father, answering in ways that no one will ever understand before we die. It has taken years for me to remember this boy, or maybe minutes. My wife runs up to me as I enter the house three hours later and she seems to have been crying. I tell her that I love her and she stops crying, she is so surprised. She feels like an acrobat in my arms, light and about to fall. I tell her about the trees behind the house and the boy and the violin. She tries to get me to say it again, to tell her that I love her, but I reply with only 2NO --> O2 + N2 and my father's ghost tells me there is no wilderness in my life. I touch my wife's foreleg as if she is an animal and she continues to cry and I think of that boy behind the house and I start to sob even louder. Rose Kelleher Comments: Whoever wrote this poem can take an extra bow for having won over an unlikely judge. I’m pretty fixated on The Line as a discrete unit. And while I am not one of those who consider surrealism a crime tantamount to rape or murder, I tend to prefer it in small, cohesive doses, not the Bag of Jellybeans style in which a hundred images slip through your fingers and spill all over the floor. But this poem doesn’t slip, it grips. It’s a lot like the photograph: dreamlike, eerie, even frightening. What it lacks in liney-ness, it makes up for in other ways. Look at the photograph: the little boy is playing the tree as if it were a violin. And he’s not just any little boy in a grown man’s coat, there’s something timeless about him, so that he could be someone’s dead father. Those equations (and I look forward to hearing how the reader who records this poem handles them) are an unexpectedly ugly, impersonal response to love; the effect is chilling, like the response of the universe when someone you love dies. These details were thoughtfully selected, and they add up to something fine: a mosaic, a mood, a haunting story that could end in any number of ways. |