A SPLASH OF NAUGATUCK RIVER REVIEW
SOME POEMS FROM THE LAST CONTEST ISSUE

15th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest Winning Poems, judged by Sarah Browning:

First Prize: Aaron Fischer

In Praise of Mary Ann Carroll			

 		 The only woman in the Highwaymen, a group of  		
                 Black artists who sold their paintings roadside in 
		 Florida, starting in the 1950s.

For her palm-frond pinwheels and exuberant clouds,
her heavy poinciana clusters, balanced
carefully as a checkbook.
Her mint-green combers and yolk-orange sunsets.

For the Masonite panels she used instead of canvas,
the gutted tubes of paint sliced open with a palette knife,
scraped clean as a gourd.
Praise this Black woman who sold paintings
from the trunk of her car in Florida in Jim Crow Dixie.
Praise the tourists who pulled over
to buy souvenirs for their spare bedrooms and dens,
who sometimes bought enough

to keep food on the table, clothes
on the backs of her seven kids.
Praise whatever kept her from the citrus fields,
the humiliations of housecleaning, the hospital bedpans,

sheets marked with blood and piss.
Praise the palmetto grass, stiff-bladed as a weathervane.
The snaky strangler fig, its bark unrolling like parchment.
The .38 snubnose tucked in the glove compartment.

Second Prize: Ellen Romano

I Walk Out in my Red Shoes					

The grown-ups tell me I’m lucky
I get to wear corrective shoes, some little girls
can’t walk at all. I could still be in the hospital,
still in traction. When I outgrow these shoes
I can get the red ones, but not before.
My shoes cost way more than my sister’s.

My mom and my aunties tell me I’m Daddy’s girl,
and talk about the tears in his eyes when he laces
me into the brace I have to wear at night.

But he’s part kind and part angry.
Our house has four rooms. We never close a door
because the air has to circulate. When Dad yells,
he’s so loud we can’t watch TV or even read.
I sit with my sister on the bottom bunk. She cries
Because she’s Mommy’s girl and doesn’t like it
when Dad yells at her. We hang a blanket over the guard rail,
pretend we’re in our own little house.

When the tornado sirens go off Mom wants Dad
to come to the basement. She reminds him
we live in tornado country, and doesn’t he remember
when Aunt Carm’s roof blew away, or when a pair
of somebody else’s lawn chairs landed in Aunt Betty’s yard?
He says the tornado is way out in the county, but comes anyway.
He’s not scared, so I’m not either.

The door to the basement is in our bedroom.
There’s another door outside slanted over the concrete steps.
If you come in that door you’re in the tornado cellar,
not the basement, though it’s the same space.

A turtle used to live down here. His name was Hannibal because
we found him on the highway on our way to Tom Sawyer’s cave.
Whatever happened to him is a mystery.
I look for Hannibal while we wait
for the radio to tell us it’s safe to go back upstairs.

Mom cries and turns the radio up louder. Dad tells her		
if the house falls down we can leave the basement
through the tornado cellar door 
and walk out into a whole new life.

                                                         

Third Prize: Jonathan Cohen

Butcher Boy

The day drops in another purple-gray sky,
headlights blink, tires spin in late winter mank.
The butchers, brothers, banter through the afternoon
about cars, dancers, money-making schemes.
Their assistant, a war-survivor given to fits,
enraged by late orders from old ladies, spits
in the chopped meat, smokes it off in the back room
with copies of Leg Man. I am good with pickling
tongue. I cut them thin on the slicer, steal a taste.
Otherwise, it’s sweep and clean, sweep and clean,
take inventory, dress chickens, wrap a brick roast,
sometimes drive a special order, sit on the counter,
the counter, the counter, wakened but dulled
and dreaming. On break, I perch there, listen
to the brothers as they mutter about the imperium
of the oil cartel, the President’s gimmicky call-in radio
show, exclaim the virtues of women they say they’ve known,
detail the cars they’ve owned and driven. One curses
the chicken man at the warehouse for bolloxing an order,
a daily rite. The other hymns a neighborhood legend
for his skill at cards, romance, business deals. They honor
their fathers by getting orders out to shut-ins after closing,
lighting candles alone in a storm, knowing there will be
no reward, that moving cases of black-market liquor,
tires, food stamps in bulk is the only way to keep
the lease, stay in the game. A brief squall peppers
the spreading dusk, adds to the slush clogging the avenue
that draws the city’s ragged margin, sinking under the weight
of snow and the announcements of more job cuts.
Buffalo Forge. Republic Steel. Urban Milling. The dirty
snow liquifies in the heat of truck wheels, fissile material
in an unstable world, forms small mountains that explode
and reform, all gone soon enough. All gone.