2009 Jeanne Lohmann Winners
Boyd W. Benson lives in Clarkston, Washington, with
his wife, three stepsons, two Chihuahuas and a Pomeranian puppy. He has taught at Washington State University
for the last decade and has published poems in
The Iowa Review, Ascent, Free Lunch and
other publications. Additionally, in
2007, his twenty-poem manuscript The
Owl’s Ears was
included in Volume 1 of the Lost Horse Press New poets Series: New Poets| Short Books, edited by Marvin Bell. Recently, his poem “Owl” appears in the
Anhinga Press anthology The Poets Guide to the Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser. Benson
serves as poetry editor for A River & Sound Review.
Rachel Dilworth’s
first manuscript, The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems of the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland, won the 2008 Akron
Poetry Prize, and it will be published by the University of Akron Press in Fall 2009. Her poems
have appeared in AGNI Online, TriQuarterly, American
Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Perihelion,
CutThroat, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in Chautauqua
Literary Journal, Bay Nature, and Southern
Indiana Review. She has
received, among other awards, a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland for creative
writing, a 2009 Jack Straw Writers Program residency, Yale's Clapp Fellowship
for poetry, commendation in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and scholarship support
from the Bread Loaf and Napa Valley Writers Conferences.
For money, Dennis Held,
once wore a giant clam suit -- yes, a 7-foot foam-rubber geoduck outfit, replete with siphon -- in which he danced a
version of the Mud Bay Stomp with the vice-president for student affairs of The
Evergreen State College. A bit later, he received an MFA in creative writing
from the University of Montana, and now teaches in a writers-in-the-schools
program for Eastern Washington University. His first book, Betting on the Night, recently
sold out its second printing. He lives in Spokane, where he runs a secondhand
store called Area 58, with his wife, Connie Grove.
Leaves
Invention: from L. inventonium (nom. inventio) “a finding, discovery”
Because winter is a type of failure,
from the center of a widening circle
you walk beneath speechless trees to
the river in the snow.
Because a
leaf in winter shapes itself to the palm.
What widens outward like birdsong or
leaves
pointing,
you follow, from the walls of a small room, downtown,
one
window overlooking a vacant lot,
with
what little choice you have. Because ripples turn blue water
silver,
the gold beneath
the
leaf is needed too.
~
These
are leaves Meriwether Lewis found: yellowing upon a lip
of
grass, knotted in the hair of children or dogs, or circling slow,
silent
creek beds – leaves a form of bankruptcy had brought him,
who
needed failure
like
blood’s ink through veins and, then, written in a face,
like
winter,
to
send him elsewhere.
Because the muscles of his
cheekbones complicate with age,
we
wonder about Lewis’ face had he lived beyond thirty-five,
a
face distant from itself, in portraits, the thin pout and brown eyes set
to
a remote corner of the painter’s room, a fly circling,
or
to some other life. A face somewhere else. A child’s
face
of
green leaves on the uppermost Missouri in August,
beneath
a Hunter’s Moon or pressed between pages of a book,
leaves
that knew only Spanish, or French, that spoke only
wind,
like birds.
Only, birds are silent now – and
your face abrupt
and
urgent, completely here, in winter,
beside a river.
~
A sketch of brown and yellow leaves against
a fence, a dark green wine bottle, damp
newspaper,
feathers, and a sandwich bag – like a thumb pressed against flesh – smeared and
heaped
there. I wonder about the woman with a baseball cap standing over them.
Lewis kept notebooks filled with the
shapes of leaves and trees, hills and rivers, birds and
beasts.
He gathered these shapes into a truth. He invented: meaning he discovered what each
shape
would mean and pieced together, page by page.
This piecing together begins from a
single
leaf.
When you are not here I hold the
leaf between thumb and forefinger, press and sketch it
into
the silent space I imagine you, between the city and the wider hills, and try
to make it
sing.
- Brian Boyd
Valence
Rain runs like a panther on the
islands—
sprung
indigo of limbs and oxidation,
of
sky and riding land and the distance
between
there and here. I grow impatient
with
watching. The hard wind stings like
liquor
and
I want to be in, to be soaked, to be overtaken
by
the change of storm, by the predatory merger
of
movement with moment in the claim of sensation.
This is the way I had waited on
beauty to come,
hunting,
severe and irresistible.
As though surely there was more
event than one
curve
of light up a white crocus or spilled
through
the underfeather of a sparrow. As though
it
would catch me in its teeth and not let go.
- Rachael Dilworth
Matrimony
Fishing.
To piss her off, she said it
again:
Fishing. So no, he didn’t have time
to
pick up the wedding invitations
which
is why she’s straddling Main Street
surrounded
by hundreds of dollars’
worth
of declarations of undying love
blowing
into sewer grates, under loutish
SUV tires, the tissue inserts
gently
unfolding their wings to rise
in
the breeze. Which is why she is crying,
which
is why the quite elderly woman
bends
to straighten the remains of the broken box
in
the middle of the street – of course she was
in
a hurry, set the damn thing on the trunk
which
she never does but she was on her
lunch
hour, sandwich now discarded in a heap
drawing
flies, she dryly notes, thinking of him
casting
thigh-deep in the Bitterroot, another
passerby
chasing down the envelopes
cartwheeling
up the sidewalk, miraculously
spared
she thinks of his thighs, the river
pressing
against them she thinks of moonlight
on
downy hairs she thinks some times
she
knows how it feels to be a river.
Fishing. To piss her off.
- Dennis Held