Nimrod/Hardman Literary Awards
Nancy White
Noah
It was illusion, you know, the water—
I realized much later. We drifted, some docile,
some going mad with it, the smell of dust washing
over us. Eventually a ragged starling (or a dove)
landed on the deck where we were strewn
in the heat, caught in its claw a shred—
green. We declared an end! Salvation!
The ramp dropped and beasts departed, most
not knowing what hit them, just glad to taste
spring creeping up from the ground.
If it weren’t for the stories I might not
believe there was a boat. And stories we pass
back and forth so their edges fray, words soft
as dust. Or who’s going to say the story
isn’t the island, with us drifting by.
Sandra M. Castillo
The Words You Stole (From Me)
1. This is my metaphor.
In the tongue of this language,
este paìs de nostalgia,
you will find yourself
fingering history, the thorn of words,
petty thievery,
composing a life
como mueca.
2. This is my simile.
Let’s pretend I forgive you,
assailing time con garras,
desgarrando él pasado
like some third world buitre
in a translated landscape
and that borrowed words,
borrowed lives
have meaning.
3. This is my life.
You could say the past swallowed me
whole, that exile is no metaphor,
no figure of speech,
a succession of phrases
like some sad lie.
Limbo es limbo.
4. This is your disguise.
Tabula rasa, you know my name and speak
my language, dress yourself
in my experience and give me
to me.
Translate this:
Es en el puente de mí memoria
donde te has parado
y donde te has visto,
inventing a life
you never knew.
Claudia Barbosa Nogueira
from Bicho
There is a small parasite, a worm, I think, that eats her way into bare feet, lays a colony of white eggs, then sits on top of her mound – a small, black dot crowning a white bump – protected by a thin layer of host skin. In Brazil, this parasite is called “bicho do pé,” the foot’s critter, its very own pet. Apparently, the “bicho” does not exist in the United States. Or, she is untempted by American feet. Description of this very common parasite (so common she has been domesticated and claimed by Brazilian limbs) makes those around me cringe. Maybe you are cringing, too?
I have had at least a dozen of these bichos at various times. Both of my feet have been penetrated and treated to the incessant itch the worm creates. Some have even called this itch delicious. My left hand has also carried a guest. In the crease where pinky meets palm. The hand grew wild with the desire to scratch itself and had to make do with tickles from its jealous neighbor to the right. Mostly, though, I provided this nest further insulation by always balling my hand, making a fist to ward off the outside. Since I am right-handed, keeping my left hand securely in my lap or casually in my pocket was never a problem. I allowed my feet to be inspected by my grandmother and prodded by her sewing needle as she dug her way around each small mound, scooping out eggs and squeezing the worm out like pus. I allowed this, but I hid the bicho in my hand so that neither my grandmother nor anyone else watched her grow during my summer vacation in Brazil.
This is how I managed to smuggle an illegal alien into the United States. I had nothing to declare at customs, although my left hand twitched nervously at my side. I was not transporting native flora or fauna, although the lines in my left hand became rivers of sweat. I just brought a small guest with me to keep me company as I flew the long hours home.
Susan Azar Porterfield
The Mountains of Lebanon
The Tennessee hills are as green with pine and cleave to sky
like these, rocks wedged with towns in slabs within the slant,
amid olive groves, grape, and clementine.
I believe my father is in Tennessee,
layered beneath a marble block,
striations of wedged bone, stone, ash.
I believe he’s here
in the Kadisha Valley, spirited lightly away,
uprooted as before.
With the Mediterranean on my left, I drove out of Beirut
where I could breathe. My heart leapt
at the quilt of silence laid down upon these hills,
the ghost of light arising, hearth by hearth, at dusk.
Adelle Leiblein
Flowers
- for Bill Holshouser
I hear myself saying, “ . . . well, greens, lots of greens . . .”
and the woman on the phone replies, “Do you want ferns, leaves?”
Listen lady, what I want is a waterfall of green, of green flowers,
green flowers in a massive wave to take our breath away, I want
flowers in green: euphorbia, helibore, those wacky green orchids
that look like creatures from outer space, that could be some species
of intergalactic frog, ready to move at any moment, that look
back at you, and seem ready to hop out of the arrangement.
I want lengths of curly willow, I want shillelaghs and the canes of leprechauns,
I want the sticks from hobos’ bindles, green wood from the exploded
corked bats of the American League. Gimme splinters of the one true cross,
make ‘em green, make the chlorophyll still live in them. Green blossoms
of emerald, and mint, petals staunched of any color except green and her sisters:
silver, eucalyptus gray, mossy moss, grassy grass. Yes.
Let the Silver Maple lift her skirts in praise and sorrow.
Flicker green of my green heart, the raising up and lowering
down of my eyes green brand, let the flowers stand for all of us
and blaze green, stand humble in grief like the sunflower forgotten
in the field, stripped of blossom, bowing a Fibonacci seed head of green.
Let the flowers mimic the bamboo fence Bill noticed once, dipped in early snow.
I say none of this. I take a breath. Take another. Because I need to
And I can. Breathe in, breathe out. This is not what I want.
Picture the Bells of Ireland and the willow wands swording the air,
the stark willow branches, the crenelated chartreuse flesh of the other,
streaming lime light so sharp it almost brings a tear to the eye.
That green.
Roger Lopata
Fixing Things
We had agreed I would take a cab from the airport, but there is no mistaking the maestro in his black cape, all six feet seven inches of him, fedora-topped, looming above the crowd
of travelers as he studies the flight information monitors.
I slip alongside him. “What are we looking for?”
“Your flight from Cuttyhunk,” he says without turning to address me. He waves at the flickering screens with a flourish that ends in a glissando of his long fingers.
“There are no flights from anyplace called Cuttyhunk. So, how am I supposed to meet your flight from Cuttyhunk when there are no flights from Cuttyhunk?”
“Providence. I told you I was flying from Providence and that I’d take a cab.”
““You said Cuttyhunk,,” he says with exasperation. “As if I could make up a name like that? And a cab would be $40, which you can’t afford.”
Neither of us has taken his eyes off the screens to look at the other. “I wouldn’t have said Cuttyhunk. It doesn’t have an airport, and you know I can afford a cab.”
My father turns. Looking down at my five feet, eleven inches, he winces. “You got a suit?” I hoist my duffel bag to indicate I’m neither as slovenly nor doltish as he suspects, but he shakes his head. “It’ll be all wrinkled in that thing. Don’t you have a proper suitcase?”
“It’s Permanent Press,” I say, not telling him I bought the suit five years ago on the occasion of his seventieth birthday thinking then it would only be a matter of time before I would be coming home for a funeral.
“Permanent Press,” he mutters. Shaking his head, my father turns toward the parking garage. “If Jules hadn’t died, that would kill him.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Pop,” I say, following the fluttering edges of the cloak he wears despite the sunny warmth of late spring. A slight shuffle has infiltrated his gait. He still has the same imperious bearing with which he would strut out onto the concert platform, but his pace is slower, and to me his speed always contributed to his enormity. He would not simply set himself before a Steinway Concert Grand; he would envelop it, subsume its eight feet, eleven and one-half inches with an authority that conferred possession not just of the piano, but the entire orchestra. For my father, shuffling is not just incongruous; it is impossible.
Uncle Jules’s death had not been unexpected. Several months ago, my mother had telephoned with news of the stroke that had left him paralyzed on one side and severely aphasic. “Nonsense,” my father, who was on an extension, interrupted her. “They need to get him up out of that bed and moving around. Physical therapy . . . ”
“He can’t move, honey,” my mother suggested.
“Nonsense,” my father recapitulated. “He can move if they make him. They’re babying him.” And, as usual, the call devolved to their duet with me as the audience. I listened to their comments fly back and forth like dueling virtuosis’. But I made a mental note to make sure I still had the suit.
Jan Ball
buying shoes in London
You have just bought a pair of Churches’ English
shoes with “branches in Milan, New York and Paris”
stamped in gold on the insole and I feel privileged
to have been with you, relaxing on comfortable
brown leather chairs while the elderly British
shoeman who could have been a butler in an Alfred
Hitchcock movie first knowledgeably informed you
that you didn’t want slip-on loafers because for
someone with pronated feet, they cause the foot
to slide forward and rub against the interior stitching,
so he brought out these beautiful two-hundred-and-forty-
dollar shoes which might be kangaroo, he says,
as you suggested. He clutched your heel with index
finger and thumb like it was a big yellow sapphire
then gently slipped on the black leather shoe, pressing
two fingers against your instep as if he were testing
the warmth of a teapot. He glided his thumb across
the bridge of your foot then appeared to caress both
sides of it and finally reined in the laces which he had
so mysteriously crossed and criss-crossed earlier
when he took the shoes out of their crinkly paper
where they had snuggled companionably together
in their rectangular box before you tried them on
and wore them home, clicking your heels all the way.