Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Contest Winners

1st Place

thursday, 2.31 pm

Carissa Di Gangi

i look up and there are your eyes, precious and fragile
as the 4-leaf clover you found on my birthday
and gave to me, pressed, for Christmas.
      i wish i could snapshot those eyes,
carry them with me like i do that clover,
tucked safely in this notebook next to
my wildfire thoughts -
      but you hate cameras like needles
and you've only let me take photos of your hands,
cupped and appearing to offer
      air to an impressionist sky.

(secretly, i've always thought
you were offering the sky to the air.

2nd Place

I Love You

Jehangir Saleh

Never, have I found a lover
Instead I keep a marigold flower
Trapped inside an oriental pot
With the silver Chinese inscription: "I Love You"
I held together our one sided relationship
I, the caregiver, nurturer, housewife, maid
Fed, cleaned and read to her
In return
My only request was that she stay
With me, alive
However:
In accordance with natural law
As beauty must frail
Hope shatter
Age fade into time
She died, slowly
With her I waited
And witnessed each petal
Float away her life
She lived twenty-seven days
I aged immensely

Tonight drips dark turquoise
I am soodng
Burning marigold incense
Trapped beside myself
Holding dead love
In my hand, an oriental coffin
With the silver Chinese inscription: "I Love You"
I am broken
The pot remains

3rd Place

"Impromptu", a duet on the brink of insight

Julianne Yip

Overture:
Absolute is comparable in its infinite
depth of thought and permanence
as grasping the concept of God.

Primo:
Her funeral held lacquered desire
floated from bliss.
A small addiction
attempted escape "now!"
asked the flowers.
Insanity, she claimed, was reason enough.

Secondo:
In the circus of heresy the scholars await
Tended by one religion of clowns.
Apprehensive, expectant,
Their faces taut with foresight,
Believing history a malleable cord of hoaxes
That twists down their spine.
They rotate their thoughts on a spindle,
Heeding in reverse concern, up, down,
The sentence that billows down, up,
Backwards, bends blasphemy into flame and ice.
The crime of knowing defies forgiveness.
In the flames, their faces vanish, knowledge,
Scholars, statements, history.
The technique of lying is commonplace,
Common punishment, routine ritual---
Exile to Paradise.

4th Place

She Feels

Sarah J. Poynter

For the
Dinosaurs' extinction

For world
Hunger

For global warming and
The hole in the ozone layer

For all diseases
Cured or not and
For death

For things that go
Bump in the night

From tornados to
Volcanoes

For everything
That she possibly
Could

The weight of the world's
On her shoulders

It's too much for her
To handle she's ready
To jump

She feels
Responsible

So, that's the way it'll
Forever be
On November 23
May she rest in peace

5th Place

reflecting on Grandma who is losing her memory, and knowing

Carissa Di Gangi

that there are things that last and things that fade.
you've always seemed the lasting type to me,
and i imagine remembering you
long after i've lost the meaning of words

by then my world will be home to only
the lasting things, expanded to fill sight.
the sunset-twilight-starlit sky will spill
slowly snow upon the grass, and butter-
flies; and i will be trudging through a field
of perfect snow barefoot and shoulders warm
from the sun and i will look up to see
a bird swoop by, and to hear your laughter,