Winner: 2006 Colorado Book Award, Best Anthology
About the Series Open Windows showcases the best entries from a writing contest judged in three categories, as well as solicited pieces from a number of authors and poets. For the contest pieces, the best entries from each category were chosen after a blind reading, then submitted to outside judges, who were not given any identifying information about the authors of the entries. The first collection, Open Windows 2005, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2007, Ghost Road Press will accept contest entries from April 1 to June 30. Please see the web site for more details. ghostroadpress.com/contest.htm
1st Prize, Poetry
Algorithm
Gravity borrows her name
from the bird who stopped trying.
He said the poem was a hinge,
that a bird fell into her womb
from the well. There is no law
that can convince me
otherwise. Call in
the scientists if you must
and name their theories
after themselves.
Our entire lives, after all,
are comprised of the world
looking back at us from beyond
our reach and saying this
is who you are.
Names the place markers
of what was last believed possible.
The dead tree leaps
across the water,
free of root.
I’m building up a tolerance
from the absence of proof.
Maybe there is some
straight line somewhere
confi ning us to the literal, but I
saw the bird’s fear as something
useful, her blindness a kind
of guidance.
Sage Cohen
2nd Prize, poetry
to my broken bird
july now a storm bruising the sky corn
tassels swaying languid in rising air
and your words return to me so many
feathers defying gravity on this long day
because now i understand and the knowing
will shatter me if given light or breath
to unfurl and i have told you this is how
a poem becomes for me held inside
dark and multiplying until it spills forth
but this is nothing like poetry at all
nothing like light on water or hope or
the fragmentary accretion of memory
this is the slow cracked motion of one
foot in front of the other but there is no
walking out of this desert forty years
forty days and even my prayer is dying
a rough thing unbidden on my lips for fear
that there is no covenant for me so i rage
as the moon silvers over my waking and
sets sharp in blood leaving skin swollen
too tight to contain this whole hurt a heart
undetectable as a thin excuse an inexplicable
biology but there is no twist in the folds
of the brain no warm muscle in my chest
no limb on bedsheets in the the hazy hours
in which to locate this ache just a broken bird
beating inside me and i can neither wring
its neck nor split open to let it out.
Jen Lamb
Third Prize, poetry
Laying in Marrow
I lay awake all last year
waiting to make love to you last night.
I lied to myself all my life
and it got me where I am.
The loose doorjamb,
thinning hair.
I don’t know how lovely I am,
how simple, how beautifully unadorned.
I am a soft rib
in the carcass of a surprised death.
I know all the answers.
It’s keeping them from myself
that’s growing hard.
Don Downey
