Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Contest Winners

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1st Place Still Here Irene Livingston Could it be that I might still be here melting into lilac bushes, lurking in the pale lilies, singing in the shell ears of daughters, old lovers? Singing down corridors, whistling in elevators, as always I have done. Will they know me? Say, she's here. For how can I bear to not be here? Here where I've shifted my allotted gifts and faults about till I've almost got it right, this life of mine. Might I still be in my park in spring? May I smile with the pink and purple lips of crocuses, move with lacy yellow grace of daffodils? Could I sit budding in the tall trees, till I burst into leaflets of bright green laughter? Could it be that some day I might stand in the grass on weightless feet and touch the shoulder of someone reading my little poems? Will they feel me as I whisper, I am here. I am here.

2nd Place Ago Carol L. MacKay At Sam and Ida's she tossed tiddly winks, hung monkeys in a chain of sun yellow Christmas red over a barrel played smooth-worn games like Chinese checkers in their lace and wood-smoked homestead. Some time after theirs, in a string of landscape & people-softening funerals, she noticed the indentations left behind. In the kitchen her daughter mixes play-doh, quiet yellows and greens into an anxious, muddy blue face. Lana leaves it, lumped-eyed on the table edge, in favour of basic beige: the sandbox outside. Door slams, mother lifts it, two-handed, to the center of the table away from the hard blow of gravity.

3rd Place Missing Heartbeats Dorothea Helms Long before I made my journey into the light, you made yours I have your name, but no memories of storytelling wrapped in a grandmother's shawl No images of work-worn hands that raised too many children in a foreign land No wafting scents of lavender or cinnamon or garlic No lullabies that spoke of olive trees and fresh plum tomatoes placed straight from the       vine into the pot I am an ancestral orphan lost among grandparented peers, aching for the front porch rocker, stop-and-listen love they have known, applause that demands no performance. Where are you, my grand babies? Will you fight your way into the light before I make       my final trek toward another source of brilliance? I want to wrap you in shawls, tell you of travels, sing you dreamland lullabies,       scent your air with anise, hear your childish bantering, and care I sense both our lights approaching. Hurry.

3rd Place The bench is grey in the black night Caitlin Reid I sit alone and feel unusually safe eating sesame snaps while mostly taxis pass mostly empty like the streets I hear the conductor over the orchestra and think of nice wake-up sex had this morning until I wonder what is to become of me which is a hard question to answer and an answer harder to hear so I am up and out and I leave my wrapper on purpose.

5th Place A Reflection of Fire In a Mirror of Gas Ken Kucharic You approach me in fire and wind, "Dionysus and the Fire", With your hacksaw harp of dead willow Breathing acetylene psalms that Hiss and sink in hands of clay, Fireflies released from the forge Spinning like pinwheels, Trailing halos Burning through the disconnected darkness of the body, Shooting through veins like a gas-fire. I meet you in the roar of the star field And burn, A hydrogen fuse, Straining voiceless in the thrush and thrum, As the earth pulses And the wind takes you higher.

6th Place Flatbush, Brooklyn Caitlin Reid I remember mailing a postcard at a mailbox in a New York bank doorway with my mom . Stony it was: the doorway, the day, but oh-- my mother.

6th Place An Easier Way? Anne Louise Currie If I could break the world in half and scoop out wisdom it would be so much easier than standing on the surface, speck-like imagining molten centres.