Three Honorable Mentions
Anthony Russell White
The Norwegian Photographer
Midday local train North out of Bologna, third class wooden
bench seats, no padding, every place taken. He was skinny,
blond, and had all these photographs he had taken of Buddha.
eating rice, Buddha walking beside a dusty road, Buddha talking
to small groups of people. Lots of Buddha meditating. But the
extraordinary thing in all of them was how Buddha was smiling.
Anyway, he must have gotten off a Ferrara while I was buying
that beer. I came back and found a young woman sitting in his
place. She was dressed in black, and clutching a big wicker
basket of white mushrooms. I sat down and waited for her to
smile.
Ron Hughes
The Road Descending Home Each Day At Dusk
This must be the dark road the fortuneteller mentioned,
This road descending home each day at dusk,
Along the curved stone wall, where shadows loom and toss like thoughts;
Where faded voices and drifts of light
Are wound around the silence and the vines.It is a path without a center,
Nor any true divergence.It is, in fact, defined by what is absent;
a collection of estrangements grown slowly over time.And my soul seems marked for this,
This separateness, this grave solitude.Here, the air is swelled with ruin.
The words of ragged songs sift through the willows
And are scattered into murmurs by the wind.I remember she said it would be a hard road, but the right road.
So I try to take all these stark things and jumble them into some sort of reassurance;Waiting for the day the road will rise a bit to reveal a garden just beyond the wall,
With flowers pitching forward in a breeze
And trees all weighted-down with fruit.Then further on, a house;
And inside the house will be a room that's filled with magic meant for me.I'll be home
And all the darkness will have been shot-through with meaning.Until then though,
It's as if I'm pulling a plow along the paved street,
marking the progress of the shadow at my heels;And the street is curving in upon itself
And I am losing light and time.
Nancy Pearson
Meditation on Fingernail Clippers
The tenuous equilibrium between, for example,
a small house and a backdoor sea.
The fulcrum, the bolder,
a bullet of soil
shifts
in Las Colinas, the mudslides
green soccer fields lined with
mattresses, relief trucks
teetering with blankets,
tortillas, diapers,
toiletry
levers
for a mother removing a splinter, two planes, two
pressed fingers and the dirty palm of a child,
his cry, an equal and opposite reaction
to relief or the possibility of
a wood chard festering
in the ooze of
inertia
In a locked space, a hospital ward, an airplane cabin,
a high school locker, the mind unbalanced,
the lithium level unchecked, his cocktails
cut- off, a weapon behind the pivot,
sidewise, gripped between fingers
and a point of
friction
Archimedes: Give me the place
to stand, and I
shall move the
earth.
