Erskine J. Prize:

Beullah Rose Prize:

Issue 19

2008

Winners

[First Place] News Clipping, 1978 by Chris Hayes
[Second Place] On Turning Forty-Two by Andrew Kozma
[Third Place] How Shall They Hear the Word of God? by Haines Eason

News Clipping, 1978

by Chris Hayes

-The Leaf Chronicle

On the flipside of another article
about Watergate, a photo—

my father at twenty-six
in his fan-powered boat,

gliding the Cumberland’s wide
stretch of warped brown glass.

I imagine my mother across town
in the kitchen of their A-frame,

tending to a skillet, or maybe
nursing my infant older brother.

The propeller that pushed my father
farther and farther away from his wife

and firstborn son, now hangs above
a window in my house. A thick twist

of oak and riveted steel, it’s nothing
more than a conversation piece, as in

Where the hell did this come from? I can’t say.
I can only tell you how it whirred and spun

on its newly greased shaft for at least
one brief morning in the summer of ’78.

My father piloted his flat-bottomed boat
downriver until the sun sank and he burned

up every sweet gallon in the glistening tank.
Not pointed toward home. Not even close.

Chris Hayes is an MFA candidate at Ole Miss where he serves as poetry editor for The Yalobusha Review. His work has appeared in Red Clay Review and Zone 3. Hayes was a finalist for the 2007-08 AWP Intro Journals Award Project. His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 16 (2009).

On Turning Forty-Two

by Andrew Kozma

There is a settling in the bones, the foundation
cracks to admit the earth has never wholly left
the body. Year after year I succumb

to gravity. My spirit, a figment of the flesh,
sees so much more from this lowered angle:
the underbelly of living, the intricate

interlock of muscle, bone, and nerve
running silent till now I feel the grit
in the gears that will never pearl. It’s true,

all true, so experience assures me.
Yet worms still curl themselves, after rain,
having escaped the ground, into black lace.

Ants tirelessly build and rebuild what crumbles,
and when they die, are buried in the larder.
Youth drones on oblivious to all,

tasting every sodden flower, as if Spring
will never end. Say true, I used to flirt
with death, blind of the face behind the cowl.

We sit at the same table now, cautiously
sipping our coffee spiked with brandy. We wait
in silence. We wait for the other to speak first.

Andrew Kozma received his MFA from the University of Florida and his PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. His first book of poems, City of Regret (2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award. His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issue 16 (2009).

How Shall They Hear the Word of God?

by Haines Eason

Chafed by numerous suns’ accusing, you who must go
go for broke in a garbled bungalow. Just a little kiss.

          “At four o’clock in the morning?” It was
          six or so days, freed of phlebotomists’ fist-pumping

syllabi. He unknots my ties, draws my tea. Why I didn’t laugh
tonight : no wonder in the recusal, squirmed away, again,

          against the severe bed’s preposition. A match lights the
          black porch. Slick oak scotches the rear of the throat.

Once was time enough for several longish years, concurring
haplessly, one by one. My boy, my boy—when ever

          will you learn? A good heart is a good bargain,
          a blameless one a burden. The brethren’s sinecure

dangles before the lips. The heathens’ many-gabled,
guttural moan. Awakes to a start, Sunday. Home.

Haines Eason’s poems appear in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Indiana Review and Pleiades. He was a finalist for a 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and for the 2008 Third Coast Poetry Award. He is a student in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. His poetry appears in Smartish Pace, Issues 14 and 16, and his book reviews appear on this website. (2009)