Nimrod/Hardman Literary Awards
Margaret Rozga
The son returns home. Alive.
He sleeps in his childhood bed.
He does not have sand dreams.
In the morning, he descends the stairs
One at a time. She asks if
He is ready for pancakes.
At night, if he drinks, he does not
Drive. If he drives, he does not
See desert stretch out before him.
He understands speed limits, remembers
Rules of these roads, slows, yields.
Two-story buildings, walls grainy as sand,
Do not look like the Mosul Police Academy,
Flat-topped roof, exterior stairway where MPs
Can bound up stairs, two, three
At a time. There they do not think
About the way back down.
Here trucks dirty with sand speeding
Along boulevards carry only picnics,
Fishing rods. Their drivers look forward
To walleye, to old age and clean deaths.
As far as his mother knows
Spilling your guts is hyperbole, cliché.
He will not explode images in her life,
Will let her think she knows the whole
Gritty story, assume by some miracle
Even war-time deaths, if not quiet, are clean.
Carolyn Miller
Indian Summer
The high, beautiful days are here at last,
the endless blue skies we’ve waited for
while the world falls apart around us. The tomatoes
have finally taken on their sugar, and sweet corn
is still in the market. But the stone fruits
are almost over, and the apple harvest
is coming in. And we are thinking about
the infinite sky, and how everything we love
can be taken from us in the illusional world,
this realm of enduring sorrow and perfect rapture.
Sue Ellen Thompson
Closing Up The Cottage
Brightening at the prospect of an outing,
my mother let us gather her from where
she had been scattered by her illness.
Inch by inch she picked her way
across the lawn to where the car sat,
idling. My husband drove
while I stared hard at the undressed
landscape and my father made
the whooshing sound with which he’d filled
the rifts in conversation since
he gave up cigarettes. Once there,
we propped and cushioned her
in a wicker armchair, where she sat enthroned
like a child-queen, thin legs dangling
just above the floorboards.
As we went about the task of shutting out
a season we’d already brought indoors,
she seemed uncommonly alert
to her surroundings, as if she knew
this was the last she’d see of the world
beyond the room of her disease.
She took it all in—every molecule of light
that tumbled free when screens were lifted
from their hinges, every leaf that danced
in the heaped-up corners of the yard,
the gulping sound that water in the pipes made
on its final journey to the hard clay underground.
I like it here was all she said
that I remember—that, and how,
when we brought her home, we carried her
in a sedan-chair made of arms and elbows,
my father scurrying behind us
with his sweeping sound, closing
and then locking every door.
Andrew Malan Milward
from Forever Swimming
There is his brain, a hedge apple of noodlyy tissues, which without your
knowledge has already begun to disappear. It’s Sunday afternoon and you’re
strumming the guitar, working on a song you can never seem to finish as the
hushed sounds of the television rumble below the bass line. Rain hits the
concrete outside, sounding like thousands of jaws clacking shut one after
the other. You put the guitar down and stare at the television as the dread
of returning to work in the morning begins to set in, and you can feel
yourself already stepping into your trousers, buttoning down your oxford.
It’s not until you’re in bed that night that the call comes from your
stepsister, an inherently positive woman, but now her voice sounds strange,
stuck in limbo between happy and sad. She’s at the hospital and she’s
breaking a rule by using her cell phone, she tells you. “I can’t talk long,”
she says. “It’s Daddy.” It will take several more minutes of confusion
before you begin to understand that your stepfather has had a stroke.
It’s all so ironic, you’ll think, later. He and your mother in town, here in
Missouri, visiting from New York, for only three days to celebrate
Thanksgiving—a trip, barely long enough to contact old friends, that, for
your stepfather, will end up lasting fifteen more days; two weeks of waiting
at the hospital for clearance to leave, hoping those pieces of his brain,
the shards of memory, return home like a wayward puppy.
The call ends cryptically with your stepsister saying, “I’m not allowed to
use this here. They say I have to shut it off.” It’s the harrowing and
selfless last communication of a spy before raising the vial of cyanide to
lip as the enemy beats down the door, the ruse finally up. You’re left
standing there holding the phone, trying to understand what the hell has
happened. Do you drive to the hospital? Should you try calling back your
stepsister? Attempt to call your mom? There is no protocol for the
situation, so you freeze.
You sleep on it, you tell yourself, that’s what you do, and it’s not until
the next morning on your way to work that you stop at Boone County Hospital
and get the whole story from the man you timidly classify as your
stepbrother-in-law. He’s your stepsister’s husband. Your stepfather’s
son-in-law. Your mother’s stepson-in-law—the nomenclature of divorce and
remarriage is a thesaurus of familial synonyms, your connection not blood
but the hyphen. Your stepbrother-in-law is himself a doctor, a mender of
ears, noses, and throats. He’s also your boss; you work for him at his
practice downtown.
Some explanation is required, you tell people when the subject of your
family comes up. There is your brother, the one with whom you share a
mother, a tiptoe-walking, puzzle-solving poet. And there are your mother and
father, sure, dueling professors on opposite coasts (he in California, she
in New York), survivors of the sneak-divorce, now the practitioners of the
post-lapsarian chilly phone call, committed to doing what’s best for our
boys. Your father was the first to remarry. So entered stepmother-one and
your baby half-brother, whose earthworm fingers marveled you over a decade
before when you first inspected him in the terminal at LAX after getting off
the long plane ride to your father’s; by that time you were already a
seasoned traveler at nine years old and used to the you-take-Christmas-I’ll
take-spring-break shuffle between parents. Your father was also the first to
get re-divorced and so followed stepmother-two several years later, and she
came bearing gifts: two more boys, brothers, steps. And then there was this:
after a decade of being single, your mom finally remarries, this time to a
man 25 years older. He has one daughter and because of the age discrepancy
your older brother, the poet, will drive you crazy by labeling her with the
misnomer “aunt.” But she’s not our aunt, you say. She’s our stepsister.
How to describe your stepfather:
He is a man, now retired, who owned an appliance store for forty years and
knows the importance of washing off all plates before placing them in the
dishwasher—he has seen a perfectly good Maytag with another five years of
life ruined by a single defiant cantaloupe seed; a man who prided himself on
“knowing every person in Columbia, Missouri,” scanning passersby for a
hearty handshake, a firm grasp of the shoulder, a winking off-color joke—he
of the sickly smile, chicken-hawk sneeze, and infectious laugh track; he is
a lover of the mounted electronic singing fish (which he will gladly play
for anyone who indulges him), train songs from the ’30s and ’40s, and a
closet devotee of hour-long teen-targeted television dramas; a man who, to
his friends’ and family’s surprise, left Columbia and moved to Brooklyn with
you, your brother, and your mother a decade before; a man who had returned
to Missouri just days ago to visit his daughter’s family for the holiday and
who, after the turkey hangover and after you’d left to go back to your
apartment, entered the guestroom of his daughter’s house to take a nap and
woke up repeating the same question over and over: Where’s Mary? Where’s
Mary? (Mary, his wife. Mary, your mother.) And now he is the man who lies in
the bed before you smiling, looking pleased as punch, completely unaware of
the Armageddon going on inside his head.
Marianne Taylor
Christmas Gift From John
The suicidal amaryllis finally did it. She plunged
from refrigerator top, decisively breaking
her elegant neck on its cold, black edge.
Truth is, she’d shown signs.
Swollen with beauty, her head grew larger
than she could bear. A week ago I thought
to hold back her water, stunt
her steady surge (an inch a day, says my son)
as if I could. No, straight as an unsheathed sword
she shot her stalk till it measured 42 inches
and burst into summer’s full bloom, east and west
together, then north and south. She lasted
less than a day. Then threw herself down
and hung there. Above one son’s penguins
another’s self-portraits, a spelling list
photos of shorebirds and children
squinty-eyed, throwing ecstatic
fistfuls of bread toward the sun.
Of course I could have saved her.
Tied her to a stake, watched her wither and brown
feel the life force slow in her stem. But no.
I have taken her head, four-faced corolla,
lipstick red striating to pale chartreuse
in the funnel to her now shallow core,
and placed it in a vase of clear crackled glass.
This holiday present from a very good friend
measures a mere foot now. But her six
amber-tipped stamen, a sex-furcated tongue,
thrusts toward me like a trombone slide
while the curling pistil invites me inside
to drink through her torn stem, consume
her truth for a day or two. And I think of you,
my friend, and hope you are well.
Winter is long, our beauty is gone,
and apart we must measure
with incremental knowledge the trail to spring.
John Surowiecki
from American Stroke
I
America Wakes Up in a Hospital Room
America believes he’s talking to his brother Stanley
who drowned ten years ago in the summer of 1956.
Gienka, America’s devoted wife, and I, his only son
[freshly re-minted by our state university], are there
as well, only less radiant. He tries to speak,
but his words slide glissando-like in and out of meaning.
He says something about Stanley being a fish out
of water, a Pan Ryba, a Mr. Fish, the indifferent hero
and purple-hearted warrior who refused to march
in parades or drink the drinks a grateful nation
wanted to buy for him. Gienka says that Stanley
was by far the handsomest of the three brothers:
She says: He looked a little bit like Franchot Tone.
Daniel C. Bryant
from The Return
Except for the bruise, the fine inch of incision, it looks the same. As
before. As the other. The smooth downward slope, the beveling up to the edge
of the areola. The nipple valentine-pink in natural light.
She turns further, into full profile, straightens her back as in the days of
good posture. The geometry of the thing. Of her. But she does not admire.
She does not wonder. She does not, in all her nakedness, grieve. For the
moment, she is removed. She is someone she may have met once.
Champagne glass, Clark had said. He must have read it somewhere. Or could he
have thought up such an image himself? But it was true: her breast would
have just fit a champagne glass. Still might.
The bruise is tender when she touches it. Of course it would be. But there
is nothing there now. Nothing palpable, as the doctor put it. Palpable. She
presses into the breast with the pads of her fingers, kneading the hurt,
defining it, daring it. No, there is nothing there at all now. Save the
hurt.
She looks from the mirror directly into the window’s glare.
* * *
Bun is sitting on the unmade bed, one back leg thrust mightily upward. He
licks his black coat, extending his tongue, his neck, to reach the long
hairs’ very ends.
She watches him. Watches him work his coat to a luster.
She lifts the breast upward. She cannot reach it with her tongue. She cups
it, simple as water, in her palm. She lets it down slowly until it hangs
free. This thing is hanging on me, Bun. It is me.
There, under the bed, is Figi. Only a tail, but it’s Figi: the puffiness,
the grayness. It flicks once, twice, and is gone. Smoke.
Sanders and Macaroni are curled in the far corner of the living room. Hardly
any furniture left, but they still obviously consider it their living room.
Sunshine carpets the center of the hardwood floor. At her entrance, the cats
look up as one. Sanders mimes a mew. Tell me about it, Sanders. You tell me
all about it.
By the front window she looks out over the rooftops staggered down toward
the harbor. A tanker, riding high, stately, disappears past the jamb,
heading toward open sea. Its tugs pipe jauntily.
What about the cats? Yes, that’s number one, the cats. She needs to deal
with the disposition of the cats now, while she’s able. She doesn’t know
seventeen people, is the problem. Nor would they all be willing,
necessarily, to take a cat if she did. Some might take more than one cat, of
course. Or at least until other arrangements could be made. If they knew her
situation. People can surprise you, how they come forward in situations. She
would. She knows she would be one of the first to come forward. But she’s
not going into detail with just anybody. Not yet, at least. She’s not going
to be pitiful.
Come to think of it, though, she does know seventeen people. More than
seventeen. Not well, all of them, but well enough. And there are shelters.
Like yours, Fullbright, remember? There they don’t put you down. They find
you good homes. They keep you until they find you good homes. Really they
do.
The sun is warm on her bare breasts. But the glass, when she presses against
it, sheer cold.
John Glowney
Good Cloth
My surgeon said
he liked to work on younger men; in the older ones
the flesh splinters, falls apart too easily
to hold the stitching.
Afterwards,
when he had finished his rough splice
with his needle,
he sent me home, patchwork,
piecework, the body
balm, succor, suture
onto itself
*
My grandmother, her aging body
like a silken robe
draped in a chair,
her hands still strong enough to pull thread
and twine and knot,
made rugs
from left-over rags, quilts,
mended shirts, overalls. Let her lay hands
on me now.
*
For weeks my body is a bed.
I can only lie quietly and finger the incision’s
new embroidery.
*
Hospitals are where you go
to die,
and so I am more grateful
than you could know
for the patch of freckles floating near your eyes,
cloudy and vulnerable as sky,
and if possible
1 am even more grateful
for the times now when we lay hands
on each other,
fumbling with the skin’s byzantine codes,
its padlocks,
these moments
when we begin to leave our bodies,
when our skeletons reach out to embrace,
bone to bone, awkward, tender,
like prisoners set free,
rising up shuddering in the moiled flesh.