Contest winners were announced at the WCDR Annual General Meeting on June 10, 2006. Winners in each category received a cash prize and certificate.
|
your chest cut down the middle, heart exposed –
going somewhere, a job, a deadline, reasons, skin turned inside out. Eyes closed. Around you people are sleeping and you have forgotten how. |
in those days
we played soft and furtive
carried with us the smell of singed
woollen mittens
burnt rubber soles
and crayon wax on woodstoves
huddled collusion and
snowballs stockpiled to harden
against the back wall of the fort
covert sensual knowledge
betrayed we hurled with a sudden intention
our weapons against your small wall
and after it crumpled and fell
walked away
Night holds you in its black fur,
moon a hanging jewel. In the ink
void, you float on nothing, eating,
sleeping like one above the gravity
of a country's wounded solitudes.
You lean away from God's night-splattered face,
as craters form in yours, dwindling in the moonlight
like a blue planet steeped in dreams.
Your room shakes with illness,
your diary sinking in your sea
of troubles like a faulty raft.
You won't make it to land—
blood pitching and rolling,
seasick with images, pen slopping off the page.
The walls stagger with light you cannot see,
eyes dry up, as your strength ebbs
in azure space where nothing's left
but splinters of remembrance, art-shadows
of things close to you, close to re-imaginings
in a blur of pills and morphine.
Mind is your raft hovering
as a sea-beast blue moves in day-sleep,
fin-fluttering as the stars look down on living water,
brimming underworld. After the slanted latitudes
of sex, drugs, and disease, there's no map left for love.
O dying navigator, O gay controversialist,
step off your raft and fall with the wave
so your soul will be free
to name the nameless, guess the space
a heart makes yearning for heaven.
you walked through my
dream twenty-eight pounds lighter
your shadowy arms unlike your own
exuding the scent of
one more island
look at what love does, you say
with a skinny smile.
look how love
lightens the load
you come back carrying less
and yet more
wake up to wonder
what chunk of your shrinking self
did the tides tear away?
you phone me stretching
your new voice
like sails over an ocean between us.
I can hear your running
as dark continents
and islands compete
then swell to swallow you up.
you were always such
a delicate, exotic thing
just come back
so I can show you.
let's look at the way
the weight
of Wendy shifted.
|
arranged beneath the small tree. An angel dangling from a branch above. The three wise men, hands to their hearts.
arms out too. Beatifically. Overnight a shepherd has tipped on his face.
has just given birth to a baby half her size. The camels were always
everyone in the room knows the camel bags can't be lifted off the camels
can be lifted from his manger. |
He is sixteen when he sees his mother, with the man from Crawford Bay, sitting by the window in the kitchen, laughing. Her hand touching her throat as the stranger strikes a match and leads it to her cigarette; the boy
doesn't know what his father would do if he could walk through that door, long home from war, lunch pail in his left hand, small bit of meat frying in the pan on the stove; the stove she hated in the house she hated and everybody knowing why it was built
in such a hurry. But his father will not walk in, not now, not ever, and the boy glances at the green chair in the living room, a heart must shrink for the boy to keep it in his chest. He thinks of his mother's future and of his future. His mother will die
in a hospital bed and he will be led to her room by a dog. The dog will take him to the chair beside her while she sleeps and he'll recall this day; the man, his mother, the kind of boy he was.
He'll recall what he really wanted in that kitchen in the small house above the lake in Nelson. What he really wanted: a piano in the living room, pupils on hard chairs in the hall outside a closed door, sure they were waiting
for something good. Stepping into rooms they'd never seen before, running water—no lugging buckets form the wells—dishes, and tablecloths and candlesticks, things for small hands to take then turn them into music.
As his mother sleeps in that hospital bed, he will pull the chair closer, and listen, the way he has heard some blind men do, listen not for at story, not for words, but listen to her breathing, for example, the scratch of white shirt and tie, the dog at his feet, sighing,
as it waits in a cautious nap by his feet. And in the darkness, he will put his head close to but not on her chest, that heart, he's certain now, unable to hold them, both.
I remember the exact moment.
Nowhere near Damascus
but an unfamiliar beach
behind a stranger's cottage.
The squeals of the other children
faded into an echo of gulls.
I sat alone, unaware
that I was soon to be lost.
The driftwood log warm
against palms and sandy thighs,
the wind the only thing moving in me.
The surf's hoof beats
closer and
closer.
Soon the water licked my feet.
I was surrounded--
an island.
Or so I wished in that moment
as the sky deepened and my nape
tingled with strange electricity.
It seemed hours I sat there,
the waves and darkness
tumbling through me,
deaf to the voices
shrilling their panic.
Something new
singing inside me.
We all spin in the circles of time
A vast merry-go-round, all frantically
Clutching the tip of the clock's hand
All getting dizzier and dizzier as each turning of days
Brings us again and again
Through the same weary old hours.
O stop this endless spinning!
Let me walk to the center of the clock
And stand unmoved and certain,
Watching the world move around me.
Let me feel something solid under my feet.
I need to know who I am.
Tightened chest
Shallow breaths taken
Eyes squeezed tightly
Fists clenched
Skin turning pale
All wish for a chance to exhale.
No finish rice no leave –
Mother is adamant.
In halting English, her message is clear and lucid.
We can throw away last night's leftovers;
See the soup swirl down the drain;
Leave a hint of meat on the bone for the dog
To gnaw.
But rice – it winks at me with its cataract eye,
It roots itself in the life of man;
Twines its tentacles around the fate of man;
Waters its insatiable stalks with the sweat of man.
It tastes of sunshine and carbohydrates –
No hint of salty bittersweetness graces my tongue,
And I am disappointed.
POEM to follow
The longest journey in the world
Starts from head,
Ends in heart
The longest journey in the world
Is merely 30 cm long,
Takes one's entire life to finish
It felt like nobody was there but everybody was there.
The side walks were packed with people, strollers, and pets.
I walked past a bench where two men were sitting.
They had raggedy clothes and busted shoes.
They were smoking.
The strong smoke clogged my throat and burned my eyes.
Their beady eyes - just like a magnet - attached to mine.
They were glued to me until I turned the sharp corner.
Ash flies through the sunset, black specks illuminated by the sky
red as blood. Red as blood. Fire.
Flames lick bare and broken trees, twigs snap and hiss,
eating away at the mass of great trees, and memories we will surely miss.
Memories we will miss. Fire.
Sirens wail, children cry, missing our home so will I.
So will I. Fire.
Huddling around some glowing coals, keeping warm in night.
A few stray sparks fly out of the pit, twirling around in flight.
In flight. Fire.
What is the meaning of life?
If it can die like a candle flame,
In a breath of wind?
Life can be extinguished so many ways,
By blade, illness or flame,
Just to name a few.
Are there higher beings?
Playing us like a game of chess?
And when they make a move,
Do we make a choice?
And when someone dies,
A piece is knocked off the board?
Or do we make our own moves,
Our own choices?
Perhaps we'll never know,
At least until we die.
You've been given life,
So enjoy it to its fullest.
The angel stands for my beautiful Mother.
The two pinecones for my Mother's and
Father's everlasting love for each other.
The three doves for Paige, Cassidy, and me
How Mom will be holding us in her arms.
Every single pine needle for all the people
My Mother has touched.
The gold ferns for the golden streets of heaven
My amazing Mother gets the chance to walk on.
The red cranberries for all the sacrifices
She made for my family and me.
The snowman for how creative and loveable
She was and still is.
The circle for no matter how far she is
No matter where we go
She is always connected to my family and me.
Poem to follow
Child/Youth Category Judge: Susan Lynn Reynolds has been writing since she was eight. Her first YA novel, STRANDIA (Harper Collins/Farrar Strauss Giroux), won the Canadian Library Association national award in 1992. She has been teaching and facilitating writing and creativity groups for several years. She approaches writing with a zeal that communicates itself to her students and comrades, who leave these experiences filled with a deeper belief in their own abilities as writers and creators. Her poetry has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. She has won the Timothy Findley Creative Writing Prize from Trent University for the past two years.
Joe Blades is a writer, visual artist, editor and publisher. He is president of the independent Canadian literary publishing house, Broken Jaw Press Inc. His poetry and art has appeared in over 50 tradebook and chapbook anthologies and periodicals. He has authored over 20 poetry chapbooks and limited edition artist books himself. Blades has been producing and hosting his own community radio program, Ashes, Paper and Beans: Poetry & Writing, since 1995. For a full biography, and listing of Blades' publications, please visit his web page at: www.brokenjaw.com/Joe_Blades.htm
Ingrid Ruthig graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in architecture. After more than ten years of practice in Toronto, she retired her licence and now writes full-time.
Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared across Canada and abroad in numerous publications including The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead (forthcoming), Event, Magma (UK), in translation in Europe, as well as in the recent anthology Letting Go (Black Moss Press, 2005).
Winner of the 2005 Eden Mills Writers' Festival Literary Competition, she has been awarded Ontario Arts Council grants for work on her first collection of poems. She is also at work editing a collection of essays on the poet Richard Outram (to be published by Guernica Editions) and an anthology of short poems. She has co-edited LICHEN Arts & Letters Preview since January 2000, and frequently contributes reviews, interviews, and poetry to Books in Canada. Her chapbook of poems Synesthete II was published in fall 2005 by Littlefishcart Press.
rob mclennan - lives in Ottawa, even through he was born there once. The author of twelve trade poetry collections including 'name, an errant' (Stride, UK, 2006) and 'aubade' (Broken Jaw Press, 2006), his poetry collection The Ottawa City Project is due in spring 2007 with Ottawa's Chaudiere Books. His poetry, fiction and critical work has appeared in over one hundred journals and anthologies in eleven countries and three languages, and he is the editor/publisher of above/ground press and the long poem magazine STANZAS (both founded in 1993), the online critical journal Poetics.ca (with Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell) and the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater (ottawater.com/). He edits the ongoing Cauldron Books series through Broken Jaw Press, and edited the anthologies evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press), side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press) and GROUNDSWELL: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press), among others, and in 2004, became an editor of the American on-line journal Drunken Boat. Since 1991 he has co-ordinated readings and launches throughout Ottawa, as well as the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair (founded in 1994) through the small press action network - ottawa (span-o). In 1999, he won the Canadian Authors' Association / Air Canada Award for most promising writer (in any genre) in Canada under 30. He is currently completing a novel, editing a series of critical collections for Guernica Editions on the works of Canadian writers George Bowering, John Newlove and Andrew Suknaski, editing a new edition of selected poems by Andrew Suknaski, putting the finishing touches on a collection of literary essays to appear with ECW Press in 2007, and working on a non-fiction book for Arsenal Pulp Press, Ottawa: The Unknown City. His online home is at www.track0.com/rob_mclennan and he often posts reviews, essays, rants and other nonsense at his blog, www.robmclennan.blogspot.com