First Prize — ‘Morphos’ by Patricia Averbach
My sister never flew to Costa Rica,
so she never saw the great blue morphos
glide and fall on iridescent wings
through cloud forests,
like magic lanterns
glowing
beneath dark canopies of leaves.
If she’d been with me then, the way she’s always
with me now, we would have followed
those blue lights through trees glistening
with rain to a clearing
where we’d watch them rise and
vanish
into a vast expanse of sky.
She would have made up names for flowers –
Fallen Lady, Coral Ladder, Cloudy Skies
and I would have smiled and not replied
Passiflora, Lobelia, Heliconia,
like the smart ass that I am
oblivious
to the pain a word can cause.
Here’s what really happened.
A call came late at night
to say they’d found her comotose,
she’d overdosed on Percocet and Tylenol.
We flew, hoping to catch her still
alive
but arrived to find a placard with blue butterflies
already hanging on her door.
Patricia Averbach, a native Clevelander, is the former director of The Chautauqua Writers Center in Chautauqua, New York. Her debut novel, Painting Bridges, (Bottom Dog Press, 2013) was praised by Michelle Ross, book critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as “an introspective, intelligent and moving novel.” Her second novel, Resurrecting Rain (Golden Antelope Press, 2020) won a Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association and was a semi-finalist for a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award under the title New Moon Rising. Her poetry chapbook, Missing Persons, (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013) won the London based Lumen/Camden prize and was cited by Times of London Literary Supplement (November, 2014) as one of the best small collections of the year.
Poet’s Website | Amazon Author Page
Judge’s Note
Our hearts were beckoned by the lush invitation of nature; then broken by the triple blows of raw honesty in self-examination, pain of regret, and depth of love: heartbreak that in some way, all humans share. Patricia has connected the personal to the universal, in powerful poetry.
—
Second Prize — ‘Self Portrait’ by Blitz
I am:
a brown snail with moon white
shell on a dry mustard stalk,
a red orange draped on bending
branches by the receding sun,
a silhouette in almond fluttering
like cut paper in the ochre breeze,
dropped fedora on the yellow leaves,
large gloves hung by the yard rake,
black bun loosened at nightfall,
umber voice amid the trees.
Blitz (AutumnBlitz Xenobuilder) was born to teachers of language, and is a child of immigrant culture. He studied fine arts (painting, drawing, sculpture), and has exhibited locally in the US and abroad, notably in Spain where he traveled via an Artist In Residence stipend in his search for Lorca’s duende. Blitz came to poetry later in his life on discovering open mics and workshops in Second Life®. He lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.
Judge’s Note
We could read once for the words’ sounds, twice for shapes and colors, and then again and again to spend time with this poet, at this moment, in this place, at this season. Like a well-drawn silhouette, the poem shows only an outline, but with a specificity of chosen detail that makes us feel that yes, we know this person.
—
Third Prize — ‘Poetic Gravitation’ by Barbara Jacksha
(Form: Found Poem)
All our found language
Spins from stars and planets
And gravity, an invisible force that
Explains how to write a poem
Gravity holds poetry in orbit
Gravity takes scraps of newspaper, cloth, feathers, bottle caps
Horoscopes, fortune cookies and graffiti from public restrooms
(They’ve got to be good for something)
And presses it into poetry
Poetry sparks
New ideas, fresh realities
Poetry cradles
The air we need to breathe;
It gives us weight
Poetry,
Scraps of language falling in love,
Holds our world together
Barbara Jacksha is the author/creator of the Vision Pages series that includes Vision Pages for Creative Writers with Daring Dreams: a vision journal for imagining your dreams to life. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Smokelong Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Summerset Review, Per Contra, Mad Hatter’s Review, and the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward. Barbara’s work has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She was also co-founder/co-editor of the literary journal Cezanne’s Carrot.
Poet’s Website | Amazon Author Page
Judge’s Note
The form of “Found Poem” seems deceptively serendipitous, so this poem on poetry (and so much more) may seem to have been created just as it describes: scraps pressed into poetry. What luck that these particular scraps fell into this exact formation, right? But actually, what skill, that the poet plucked from between planets the words that could appear to spin themselves effortlessly into a breathtaking expression of the breath of life.
