First prize: Frances Galleymore
My Father Travelled
When my father was a
giant he was
the man in the moon, a
will o' the wisp
breathing tobacco and
red wine, you knew he'd been there.
His empty chair was
green, it yelled
echoing red absence, but
every time he came home
with gypsy eyes and a
coal-burned chin
stoked with mystery and
mischief he was changed.
He puffed smoke for the
neck of a black swan.
He spoke gobbledegook
his moon friends understood.
My father brought home
treasure in battered leather bags,
marvels never seen
before, a puppet theatre, wooden house,
mantillas, cuckoo
clocks, a horn and costume dolls.
He gave me a True Relic
splinter from the Actual Cross
in a plastic case.
When my father was home
he always said yes.
The house filled up with
cat, dog, donkey,
hens, rabbits, hamster,
snakes and guinea pigs.
When I was old enough he
took me with him, travelling
on ferry boats, over
borders on long trains at night.
I was gut-heavingly
sick. His empire shrank.
My father moved to
another town, he travelled
from there. His absences
grew ordinary,
they were quiet, they
were pale.
A foreign king decorated
him.
When he grew older,
sometimes his bones broke, saying
they didn't want to
travel. He chafed
at being still.
When he was old and
frail and hadn't been seen
his neighbours worried
for him. They were surprised
to learn he was
travelling, slowly.
A scent of roses invaded
his last journey.
Was the earth calling
him home?
This time in a for
ever mystery, he was gone.
Second prize: John
Richardson
enfilade
from the short guide to
Mompesson House:
"… so when the inner doors are open, an
enfilade or vista
through the house is created."
You'll have noticed fat
men dancing, often dance alone,
possess the grace of
elephants; like them their steps,
movements are
deliberate, deft to the bone
their slow body slides,
glides, pirouettes,
eyebrows raised in mock
surprise at your Oh!
I-didn't-know-you-could
look at their gigantic silhouettes
reflecting off the
glitter-ball. You should know
when forsaken fat men
waltz, floorboards creak in three time,
the whole house hums a
deep vibrato
in sympathy. Fat men
line-
dance, like elephants
marching trunk to
tail; it's as though a
fabulous fine
ponderous clock is
ticking over. You
might reasonably
suppose,
I suspect they do,
that the clanking cosmos
slows,
perhaps pauses, even
suspends
time to admire their
friendless fandangos.
It's then, like the
gravity of a galactic lens
opening doors to other
rooms that align,
their mighty multiple
gravitas bends
light; yields to glances
back on another time,
exposes vistas beyond
this mad every-day dance,
where paralleled mirrors
reflect their infinite line.
It's here the partnered
portly prance
to perfect their minuet
and gavotte,
blessed with the grace
of elephants.
Third prize: NJ Hynes
On Wednesday
a 40-foot whale landed
on Redcar beach.
'Pity it's dead', tutted
a man from Thirsk
who'd brought his son
along for a look.
On Thursday ferrets were
singed by flames
so fierce they were seen
by fishermen at sea.
Nine allotments went up,
chickens burned.
Friday morning monkfish,
haddock and brill
lay sequinned and still
at the last fish auction.
Two children, a boy and
a girl, had broken
bones after a bouncy
castle blew into a wall.
On Saturday we climbed
the Miner's Trail,
skimmed cliff tops
marked by yellow dots –
an old pit, the next
pub, the moor's edge.
Almost every cottage was
for sale or let.
We pieced together a
jigsaw of the view
from our back window,
assembled a sky
brighter than any we
knew. Worked late
to fit the seawall into
place before leaving
on Sunday, away from the
fisherwomen
of Staithes, their
double-crowned bonnets
and stinking hands
pressed into a postcard,
the foundry at
Skinningrove a museum,
the young men at midday pushing prams,
the sign saying that
salmon have returned.
Commended: David Lukens
In Transit
I haven't seen it now
for several years, but I know
exactly where it is. In
the loft between the ice skates
and the early Private
Eyes.
A small blue suitcase -
chrome clips furred with rust,
cover thin and cracked
like skin. So sixties! Made for
nylon smocks and curling
tongs.
I imagine it, tucked
behind her legs
in a chrome lit café,
where she drinks a milky tea
and thinks sad thoughts
of what went wrong.
She settles on the night
bus home
and, when no-one's
looking, pops another pill
then rests her fragile
cheek against that case.
I looked inside, God
knows when it was,
and found a photo of her
naked; more fragile skin,
and a summons - drunk
and disorderly in a public place.
There was other stuff,
letters, tickets, scraps of verse
but I lost my nerve, not
wanting answers
for questions which I
couldn't ask. In fact
I didn't really want it
in my loft. Somehow
it survived two deaths
and then had nowhere else to go
except of course the
oblivion of fire.
Which somehow still
feels premature
a peace not yet
deserved, nor understood
until I look at least at
what remains.
Commended: Euan Tait
Trauermusik for James
Bubear
i. The vacated,
recovered self.
Over the hours, your
absence
louder and louder, an
online
fireflare: its smoke
passed
through my rooms, drift
prayers;
two Saturdays later, I
whispered
where are you, James? into
the cold and beautiful
air,
passed the Revolution
bar,
from where your
watersteps
had evaporated,
unreadable,
a silenced trail of
naked feet
down to the deafening river.
ii: Von deinen Thron
tret' ich hiermit (The Old Hundredth)
All people that walk
into the night streets,
link
laughter to laughter,
all people
having a drink,
howling and hilarious,
all who sense,
way above their heads,
the loud music suddenly
thin,
and switch off,
all such people
stop talking
and walk outside,
hear breath as paper
in the water, water
no longer water,
nor light as itself,
except
a slowly distorting
glitter.
Commended: Wendy Klein
The Natural History of
Ulaan Bataar
Having stepped from the
gabble of the street
onto buckling lino
that crackles underfoot
Having shut your
nostrils to the reek of bleach
that saddens the
corridors
of this government
museum
Having fled past the
room of the astronauts,
Mongolian and Russian,
blazing
with shared Soviet
pride, braved
the woolly rhino's faded
photo, his bones
spread out on a counter
painted
hopeful meadow green,
met the chinless gaze of
the Arctic hare, her doubt-
filled eyes; cotton wool
snow tucked
on a branch behind her
head
Having flinched before
the snarling Siberian wolf,
futile and moth-eaten
behind glass,
her stuffed cubs at her
feet
Having opened myself to
Shamanic legend –
the duty of the wolf to
bring nurturing,
wildness, wolf-ness into
the world
having failed and failed
to grasp lessons
about cultures in
varying states of disrepair;
having walked away even
sadder.
Commended: Julia Deakin
Eleven wonders
1 Snow.
2 At around seven, your
first
bluebell wood. From then
on, however far you travel
there will never be
another.
3 The fact that you do
travel, far.
4 That those huge metal
slugs take off and float
over seas of cloud few
humans saw till now,
but 5 that you have.
6 Winged flight of all
kinds – a bird's vulnerability
weighed against that
gift.
7 That all things
distant go on moving and sounding
without you.
8 How a wound heals: its
ministering armies.
9 Infinitudes of scale,
both ways.
10 The sea – a
certain haziness before that grey blur glimpsed
between hills parting
like curtains on a show
to which all these
are mere overtures.
11 Snow.
Assistant organiser:
Hilda Sheehan
Kitchen Drama
So many women in one
kitchen: washing the pots,
cleaning the sides,
scrubbing the oven.
They set the timer for
hours and hours
of the same, 24, 24,
then set it again.
Martha cries, she will
never get another load in
before midnight , and it spins her head into creases –
there's not an inch of
kitchen without a woman
moving on it, there's
colour and white, fights
over Persil and Bold 3,
Mary sobs for comfort.
As for cooking, Lydia
and Anna to stew: they
will mash and stew
until Tuesday, when
something gets boiled.
The moon is a bowl of
sugar.
Rebecca becomes the
shape of kitchen,
her brain fills the
sink. She notices her face gone
to tough kitchen-paint,
fully scrubbable.
Hannah pours soup for a
thousand children,
warms a wooden spoon on
the quiet of her dress,
leans her hair into
dripping, then leaves,
to drive a car, (someone
has to move the corpse).
The others get
distorted, excited on bleach,
explode into
dragonflies,
tremble for cooking oil
as dishcloths drip
from the ceiling like
pupas.
There's an empty
cupboard where the crying started.
Martha wonders when the
floors will get done.
Judge:
Michael Symmons Roberts
Fox
in a Man Suit
Masked,
gloved, brush tucked flat
against
her back, faint with heat
this
vixen is silent at soirees,
attentive
to talk of defence, the public purse.
Emissary
from the wild woods, agent
from
the other side, she shakes her head
at
wine, at canapés, she gags on human
stench,
their meat and sweat.
When
taxis come, she slips through kitchens,
drops
to all fours (still in black tie),
sprints
along the back streets
like
a feral duke until she meets the edgelands
where
– rubbed on
the shuck of a tree –
her
man-skin peels off
like
a calyx and the sleek red flower unfurls.
Tongue
drinks in the cold,
nose
down in leaf mould, deep rush and tow
of
attachment, of instinct. I, the only witness, take
this
for a resurrection (body sloughed
and
after-life as fox-soul), so I watch
in
awe and slow my breath until
she
catches sight and howls and howls.
From The Half Healed, published by Cape
Preliminary
judge: Cristina Newton
Edison
Peña Runs The Six Miles
There
are places in the Atacama desert the rain has never been to.
The
rain doesn't know the inside of the puckered tunnels
of
the collapsed mine where Edison Peña dreams
he's
eating a fist of sand. The running scene features him
guzzling
from the tap over the kitchen sink,
and
his wife with washed hair reminding him there are glasses
and
fondness; then a close up of himself
forever
finishing that bedrock and rocksalt bite.
When
he wakes up, he's still a lump in the gut of a whale
that
won't cough up. A knot in the throat of a world
that
swallows hard. His body is eating itself
half
a mile down the driest place on earth.
Time
stews slowly in the dumb tum of the mine.
Time
has nowhere to go in a tumor of rock
on
a spoonful of tinned fish and a sip of bad milk every other day,
and
drills holes in a man that it fills with dross.
So
Edison Peña gets up and runs up and down the doltish pit,
till
he reckons he's done the six miles
from
the mouth of the mine to the mouth of his woman
waiting
at the door. Then he stops with his face to the wall.
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