Erskine J. Prize:

Beullah Rose Prize:

Issue 19

2009

Winners

[First Place] Remember by Miriam Bird Greenberg
[Second Place] When My Back Gave Out, I Fell by Lisa Norris
[Third Place] Jung at the Harbor by Danielle Cadena Deulen

Remember

by Miriam Bird Greenberg

The ruined caravansarai
we approached at dusk where boys lolling on the lip of a well
idly sent three bursts of bullets

into the air, neither welcome
nor threat. Remember, one told us of another who had fallen
into that same well

and tread water three days
calling like a baby bird for its mother. Only they didn’t say it
like that. One said

the water here isn’t safe
to drink right now but come to my house for supper; we boil tea
from melted snow.

Miriam Bird Greenberg recently ﬁnished her MFA at the Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, Indiana Review and No Tell Motel. She has been awarded residencies from Headlands Center for the Arts and Blue Mountain Center and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She was a ﬁnalist for the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. [bio updated 2011]

When My Back Gave Out, I Fell

by Lisa Norris

in grass face up and looked at branches
of ripening plums: nothing
but bone on nerve.

From that saddle of pain, I looked
at the wide world, just the same—paint peeling
from the porch, thorny weeds outgrowing
ornamentals. Birds pecked at the plums
and shat while I writhed in that grass,
bees going about their business:
the material world lived as long as I looked
and I could see, though it was no
pleasure. I got up, half-

dragged, half-scuttled to shelter
where I blew my nose, and lay
under the weight of the ice pack,
where the wok’s curve, the cutting
board’s plastic and the gray antennaed radio
did not budge. The red bowl held
ridiculous comfort. What was
had a presence, while the unmoving
mirror of the toaster’s surface made
light of my face.

Lisa Norris's book of short stories, Toy Guns (Helicon Nine), won the 1999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize. Her poems, essays and stories have appeared in Ascent, Fourth Genre, Kiss Tomorrow Hello (Doubleday, 2006), Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore and Segue. She is an assistant professor of English at Central Washington University. [bio updated 2011]

Jung at the Harbor

by Danielle Cadena Deulen

The tide is a kind of alchemy on the shore—
a dream that dreams
itself. Far away in the desert

there’s a man who can listen to
the rhythm of the earth, or believes he can
which, in the end, is the same thing

since the mind can contain everything
past and future—but I wonder
what it sounds like—the high-pitched

keening of nerves? The lowly, repeating
thud of the heart? In the distance
a ship moans into the horizon—

what is it, if not desire? I’ve lost
my mind, and come here to find it.
I build little castles from the loose rock,

making sure the structures are balanced.
At home, the archetype of wives
prepares my evening meal. As she lifts

the kettle and ladles the soup in bowls,
I cup my hands to the water. This synchronicity
is marriage. An unconscious

lulling together like the endless span
of the horizon and the ship moving away
out of distinct view until it becomes

part of the collective memory of ships,
and so part of my memory, where it continues
its journey further and further in

the horizon of my mind, so that I no longer
know it. I travelled on a ship like that once.
Part of me departed here. Look: the waves.

Danielle Cadena Deulen is the winner of the 2011 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize for her book Lovely Asunder (Arkansas, 2011). She was the 2007-2008 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She received her MFA from George Mason University and is pursuing a PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah. [bio updated 2011]