by Loretta McKeever
daily
for several months
I pause
to walk behind you
and Isaac
with my own son
roads and roads
away
I envy
your three day
retreat,
calamitous though
it may be
many read
your heart
with confidence
and vie to speak
for you
nearly all are loud,
frightening
the ram
in the thicket
As I look up I recognize infinity
Spreading itself above me
Curving behind Western mountains.
Allowing the sun to deliver a dazzling farewell of color
In perfect harmonious blends across its canvass.
In recognition,
The Earth shrinks to a mere pebble
And I, a grain of sand
My worries, dust…
Blown away by the magnificence of perspective.
Reflective thought within my infinite mind
Spins on its invisible axis.
I was made in this image
Through faith, willed into being.
No separation here, no parallel either.
Only a demand of co-existence and a willful submission
To the laws of the infinite universe
That I swallowed up billions of years ago,
And which lives in me
And births its miracles through ...
The devil lives with me
He moved in some time ago
He cooks for me and never burns a thing
He spends hours and hours in the kitchen
Says it’s where he feels most comfortable, ya know
He tells me to leave when I complain of the heat
It gets on his nerves when I do that
So mostly I stay in my room until the meals are served
When I go down, the table is always beautifully set,
and the meals, well, it pains me to say this
because he works so hard —
but they are always just awful!
By Shonda Renée
When it is said I love you
One feasts on delicacies to die for
Licking, nibbling and sucking things
From shells that slide down your throat
Into your belly — where you live.
You lay pearls that never lead you back
They only push you forward
Toward the edge of the planet
And an obligatory step into encased space
Naked in bare faith.
There, stars wink conceit and hover arrogantly
Mumming their secrets
Or maybe they really don’t know
why, how or what for.
You glimpse a falling spectacle
Once held in pure black love
Now screaming from the scene
Because one or the other let go
You wish nobody let go
Still, there are ...
by Patricia Wellingham-Jones
At dawn on a breath-stealing day
we took coffee and chocolate milk
and mangoed oatmeal to wood chairs
by the creek. Our hair feathered
in the breeze like dandelion fluff
in the last swish of coolness
before the north wind fired up the valley.
An otter family tumbled sleek brown bodies,
splashed among rocks. Fish flicked silver
in the white sun of noonday.
As finches dipped beaks in a drying bird bath
three small boys yipped and shrilled
like parrots in the wild of the creekbank.
Flung water, smelly sneakers, deflated balls.
The western sun slanted apricot rays
through cottonwoods. Over the bridge
pedaled a mother and daughter in red helmets.
Just ...
Judges Award Winners 2002 Turlock Arts Commission Poetry Contest
3rd place by Sheila D. Landre Modesto
Bobbie Watson, she was gracious,
the way she wore her garden hat
among the bearded iris,
every color, row on row,
bending to her gloved caress.
She would smile and talk
to violets by the doorstep and
make sure the cats each
had a sunny spot to nap.
Bobbie Watson, she was gracious,
the way she sat so regally
in an antique chair
in her handmade house,
pastel portraits of her children
on the wall. She paid such
close attention, asked such
thoughtful questions,
listened.
Bobbie Watson, she was gracious,
the way she comforted and
held me in her warm embrace
the day of Ernie's funeral
--How suddenly ...
Judges Award Winners 2002 Turlock Arts Commission Poetry Contest
2nd place by Gary Thomas Turlock
Uncle Josef took the blankets
from the barracks after
basic training,
laundered them,
pressed them on the mangle,
pinned the pattern
of his prewar business suit
to the flat beige rectangles
that had sheltered so many
young bodies bound
for so many wars,
and with his tailor's shears
sliced himself a three-button jacket,
two pairs of pleated pants, with matching vest
and enough left over
for a homberg, fedora, jaunty beret.
All this because of skill, supply,
demand for young men
elsewhere.
Judges Award Winners 2002 Turlock Arts Commission Poetry Contest
1st place by Salvatore Salerno Modesto
I'm amazed.
He has silk and crimson roses,
clearly the floral trophies
of our block, but that's not why
I am amazed: he's eighty-two,
smokes Pall Malls, has a broken nose
and face reflecting every weather,
but that's not why
I am amazed: but this,
the way he works each day
to keep his yard and roses shining,
how he throws his tools
at sunset on his lap,
and rolls his legless body up the ramp.
By Nancy Wahl
1.
Time was large once, roomy
parabolas around long, slow days
that wound through corridors between
anticipations. You could scream
at the top of your lungs allee allee oxen free
with your friends throwing brown rubber balls
over rooftops, or sit for hours on green lawns
building miniature cairns out of colored bits of glass,
arranging them in orbits like stars.
Pick bunchy little dandelions
and wonder why, always why, the yellow
was magic. Birthdays, Christmases, and summers
were all coordinates outside Cartesian spaces,
circled on predictable calendars.
2.
Because he’s younger than we, our guide
paces himself and motions us on
as the trail gets steeper, twisting into narrow turns
around glacier-polished rocks with shining
surfaces ...
By Nancy Wahl
She stood there, not tip-toe like Keats
upon his little hill reaching for beauty,
but all atwitter in white shorts and tennies
on my front porch. So much brightness
she was: her yellow blouse, sun
reflected in her eyes, love
of her new husband on her skin.
They had planted a garden
and, good neighbor, she was bringing
me a basket of bright red
vine-ripened tomatoes—her young bride’s
smile rousing memories
of my own beginnings—summers
at Lake Tahoe, a first kiss:
my Winandermere shores
around which I would wander in youthful
ecstasies, elated, with unbearable
anticipations: fears growing like mountain lichen
in my unconscious—always the sense
there must be endings. On a television
documentary, a young woman in ...
