A SPLASH OF NAUGATUCK RIVER REVIEW
SOME POEMS FROM THE LAST CONTEST ISSUE
14th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest Winning Poems, judged by Lisa Kwong:
First Prize: Gloria Heffernan
At the Blind Poet’s Reading, I Contemplate Deafness I tell myself it’s the acoustics. The auditorium is vast and the single microphone no match for the twenty-foot ceiling. But the shrill siren of tinnitus conspires with what the doctor called measurable hearing loss. The poet’s words are muffled like footfalls in new snow leaving me alone with my thoughts. The poet’s service dog reclines on the stage a few feet from the podium. She sleeps for much of the reading. She’s heard the poems before. My attention drifts to her twitching feet as she runs through a dreamscape. I find myself wishing she would bark— just a few deep contralto woofs to tell me that some things will still ring out clearly like a bell on a buoy or geese in an October sky— something to assure me that I will still hear music, even if it is forever underscored by the siren that never ceases. As the poet talks of Milton, I think of Beethoven. I wonder what it might feel like to stand on the beach in Maine and feel waves that I cannot hear lapping at my feet. I think of the times I have begged my rambunctious nephews to be quiet for just a little while, dreading the time when I will have to beg them to speak up. The poet finishes his reading and the audience erupts in well earned and blessedly loud applause. The dog awakens instantly, rises to her feet, all senses engaged as she returns to the poet’s side. I strain to hear the tapping of her nails against the wooden floor as she escorts her master down the stairs.
Second Prize: Diane DeCillis
Eating Grief After a scene from True Blood The toasted, buttery aroma of pecan pie wafts through the screen door. Sookie follows the scent into the kitchen where she finds her grandmother lying on the cold linoleum, hemorrhaging from stab wounds—her body lit by a shaft of sun cutting through the pretty lace curtains. She blankets herself over Gran, her white blouse soaking up the last precious drops of family blood as she tenderly strokes her brow, cups the waning warmth of her face. Gran, who raised Sookie after the sudden death of her parents helped ease her granddaughter’s pain, a young girl who feared being swallowed by the whale of loss—the emptiness burrowed deep as a secret grave. After Gran’s funeral after friends, neighbors gathered with cakes and casseroles, the house emptier than ever before, she wrestles with desire to close herself off, the urge to seal the heart’s mouth until it resists its own nourishment. Alone in the kitchen, she removes the pie she’d hidden in the back of the ice box, studies it, picturing the care Gran took, her thumb delicately fluting the soft dough, each pecan carefully arranged. Full of the glut of grief, she eats—slowly, deliberately, each spare forkful, each hard swallow—she eats until the last of Gran’s pies is gone.
Third Prize: Gail Thomas
Laika and the Polar Bear My love won’t watch a movie until she checks the website, Does the Dog Die? People dying, no problem. I grew up watching Old Yeller with my father who never cried, weeping movie tears on the couch. Then there was Laika, the Soviet street dog who survived the centrifuge test and could eat and shit in a small space. When Sputnik 2 launched, her heart beat three times faster. By the fourth revolution, heat sensors failed and Laika died. Newsreels blared her contribution to man, but not her end. In four years Yuri Gagarin launched from the same pad. Researchers say 700 species on every continent suffer loss of habitat, from tree frogs to snow leopards, chipmunks to elephants. Laika’s scientist trainer says, We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of a dog, while a polar bear claws her way onto shrinking ice.