Featured Poems
I Married In the Year Of Assassinations
What astonishes is the singing.
— Jack Gilbert
Foolhardy—to try for undying love
while the world implodes.
June, 1968. Robert Kennedy’s murdered in L.A.—
his Patrician head brought down in front of cameras.
Two months before, Martin Luther King
crumpled on a hotel balcony.
Even Andy Warhol shot at his desk
on a summer workday. And a sordid war
splayed every evening across living room screens.
Against this scrim of blood, I gave myself over.
So did four million other Americans.
Quantum physicists tell us about entanglement—
the universe linked at the most intimate level.
But we already knew it--the desire to conjoin.
To fall asleep and wake every new day
holding another. In December,
from Apollo 8 and the moon’s far side,
we saw for the first time our opulent jewel
hanging in the dark heavens.
Fourth Place Award
Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards, 2022
Photo: Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA
Judith Chibante
Banished behind the Piano for Talking Too Loud
during Art in First Grade
It wasn’t Elba or a prison hell-hole but the back of an aged upright
with chipped keys and a sag of bench sitting in a far corner of the classroom.
And it’s where I go and stand for a few hours (my teacher forgets me there)—
a six-year-old marking time with an ancient engine of sound. I explore its anatomy—
the slanted underside of soundboard, its knobs of bundled wires. I trace
the wood posts and grainy frame, and smell the musk of worn wood.
Classroom lessons become a background blur of sound.
I’m wearing a ruffled dress of poppy-red tulle
that spills onto a polished bench. I turn in a flush of hot light,
peer into a hushed dark where shadows wait for my debut recital
of “Fur Elise.” I look down at fingers quick, deft, strong.
The swell of music moves up my spine
into the whole of me.
Then a scramble of voices. Desk lids clatter open and closed. Recess comes and goes,
as I learn how to frame solitude--how to get ready for the wilderness to come.
Grand Prize Award
Ina Coolbrith Circle, 2025
For Lot’s Wife (A Parable of Fame)
If you live, you look back…
--Ada Limon
Hands that wove hearthside rugs
calcified. Nipples hardened
into alabaster stars. Salt-flesh
lain open to animals, their tongues moving
over your body, claiming your salt as life.
What a wonder on the Jordan plains,
the stump of you for passing caravans--
a wayside marker for goatherds and keepers
of sheep. Down the slopes of millennia still
you come to us without a name. Yet
while your kinsmen lie in forgotten graves,
yours is the story on our lips, the sharp brine
in our mouths.
Third Place Award
Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards, 2023
