Here are the matchups for the East Region’s Second Round:
7) Gregory Orr
Father’s Song
Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.
Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child’s blood so red
it stops a father’s heart.
My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.
Round and round: bow and kiss.
I try to teach her caution;
she tried to teach me risk.
versus
2) Robert Welburn
A Sentimental Reason
A gull flies near this building,
circling it sometimes, flapping away
the swift currents this far up
the penthouse, or diving into them.
one sees the glint of its eye
how in the spark of its flight
there lies some sentimental reason,
buoyed perhaps by a crooner’s songs
and the clearing skies, and
the crows playing with the width
of the river like a guitar.
3) James J. Roberts
Normalcy
I met a normal person once
but soon forgot the name
or size or sex or frame
of him or her, I am afraid.
No matter,
for they are all the same.
versus
6) Julia Spicher Kasdorf
A Family History
At dusk the girl who will become my mom
must trudge through the snow, her legs
cold under skirts, a bandanna tight on her braids.
In the henhouse, a klook pecks her chapped hand
as she pulls a warm egg from under its breast.
This girl will always hate hens,
and she already knows she won’t marry a farmer.
In a dim barn, my father, a boy, forks hay
under the Holsteins’ steaming noses.
They sway on their hooves and swat dangerous tails,
but he is thinking of snow, how it blows
across the gray pond scribbled with skate tracks,
of the small blaze on its shore, and the boys
in black coats who skate hand-in-hand
round and round, building up speed
until the leader cracks that whip
of mittens and arms, and it jerks around
fast, flinging off the last boy.
He’d be that one–flung like a spark
trailing only his scarf.
4) Seth Abramson
Europa
When the angelus bell was struck he came
down into himself again. Beneath the wars
of birds, lines were hauled
and men climbed toward the sky like spiders.
A week on the smoldering earth trailed him;
the waters waxed and waned
philosophically: church, politics. Love, self.
Somewhere notes were playing
that in time would be his heartbeat. But
not yet. The lines that held the world fast
were still the latitude and longitude of an Age.
His belief he was climbing
was still the longest tether.
versus
12) Philip Booth
Nightsong
Beside you,
lying down at dark,
my waking fits your sleep.
Your turning
flares the slow-banked fire
between our mingled feet,
and there,
curved close and warm
against the nape of love,
held there,
who holds your dreaming
shape, I match my breathing
to your breath;
and sightless, keep my hand
on your heart’s breast, keep
nightwatch
on your sleep to prove
there is no dark, nor death.
16) Dean Young
From “This Living Hand”
It’s not only the word roses
lurking inside neurosis or the fact
that most of my formal education
occurred in the midwest, so too
my summer job inhaling industrial
reactants should be considered.
It’s an unstable world, babe.
Always an inner avalanche
as they say in receiving.
I’m sure if I’d gotten a shot
of Karl instead of Zeppo Marx
in utero, things would have turned out
differently. Instead, my mother
went right on eating lobster.
But where were we? . . .
versus
8) Saskia Hamilton
The Song in the Dream
The song itself had hinges. The clasp on the eighteenth-century Bible
had hinges, which creaked; when you released the catch,
the book would sigh and expand.
The song was of two wholes joined by hinges,
and I was worried about the joining, the spaces in between
the joints, the weight of each side straining them.
