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Second Place
Third Place
Honorable Mentions
Kevin Craig
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Come with me, this journey. Eat the wild white. I dream of cars and carry-on bags, Europe in an afternoon. Train station, smoky, Lifted from a canvas Of 1930s Parisian night. Trees line the boulevards still, And journey we must, If living can be done in a day. Café, night calls, brings us closer To words being culled, Placed gently with the love of a weaver Into notebooks, corners curled. And smoke, not because we do, But elegant, the patterns lifting From our upturned cigarettes, As we bring the words to life. Sip chardonnay, We will, watching red points of light Walking towards us, Arm in arm of a night, Lovers wandering the cobbled streets. We will laugh with them As they stumble past our table, Us hunched over, writing manic, Words in a notebook, Words in a notebook. And now the lovers, Long since past, have melted Into the casual words we write, Locked keepsakes we will have Forever, These notebooks Where we ate the wild white, Paris streets, traveled journey. Manic poets on a binge of words, Come with me. |
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Anne McGovern
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She lives in New York City. I draw the hot breeze flicking the leaves, draw my body with passion like two cats fighting in a storm. Draw with strips of red pepper and a fig, draw upside down with a twig dipped in black ink. I draw shapes of honey-colored rocks and artichoke flowers as blue as old ice in Antarctica. I draw women's kitchen voices and clang of pots. I want to draw the taste of paella and getting drunk on sangria with slices of apples and oranges. I want to draw the yellow butterfly zigzagging across the patio this moment. I want to draw last night under the fat moon, swimming naked, bats skimming the pool. I want to draw how I was, alone. |
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Lisa Tobe
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Lisa developed and directs Womens Mountain Passages, a non-profit which works with women and girls to connect with their strengths so they may improve their lives and facilitate social change in their communities through leadership development, advocacy, youth programs and support networks. Through this non-profit, Lisa coordinates Truth Telling, a project that works with women through art, writing, theatre, oral history and photography to examine the impact of violence on their lives. These narratives, represented in A Cry for Hope, a stage production co-authored by Lisa, represent womens stories of struggle, survival and healing, as well as explore how Plumas County responds to these issues. Lisa has performed at Words and Music in Chester and Quincy, the San Francisco Women Against Rape annual benefit production and Vagina Monologues. Lisa also directs her own consulting business, Sierra Resources, where she works with communities to prevent violence. An outdoor enthusiast, Lisa has been backpacking for over 10 years, has hiked the 211 mile John Muir Trail, volunteers as a white water raft guide, and enjoys playing ultimate disc, biking, rock climbing and climbing peaks. Words, grit hard against her teeth, fall between her lips as she begins to tell me of a journey that takes her from Kentucky to Kentucky. She mentions dirt trails that turn into roads and trails again as memories emerge slowly like a Polaroid slick dark colors painted one on the other. She talks of Maple seeds, crumpled helicopter wings weighted on one side spinning in a circle as she chases them across paved lots outside her Catholic school, a small cluster of brick buildings where she played outside, learned inside, ate in the basement and prayed at church. Hard, wooden pews pressed through blue plaid school-girl skirts as she sang loud off-key in a pre-adolescent scream. She tells of walking across uneven dirt to the field's edge where she balanced on barbed wire that had grown into Sycamore trees, leaving spots of rust like drops of blood against the thin gray and white bark. Denim legs shaking in quick, jerky movements she reached for the lower limbs, before climbing those trees in slick soled hand-me-down boots. Sitting on a branch as big as her waist, she'd pick the bark piece by piece until she reached the white, smooth underneath. She points to her chest, wheat colored skin stained by two blue dots stacked one on top of the other the remainder of an outline drawn with black permanent marker After treatment, she scrubbed her skin until it and the marker peeled off in layers, until she reached the white, smooth underneath. Sweeping out her arms before sinking to the Earth clay dust in her hair, turning it burnt orange, back to dirt. I am lost in her movements. As she talks of a blue hum that closes around her mind, she chokes on her words flashing bright and dark, bright and dark like a subway moving above ground through a city at night images blending until street lights and faces look the same, until it empties into darkness. Finally, they tell fractured story lines creating a photo's negative drawn by their hand leading her to the white, smooth underneath. |
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Matt Beatty
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A warm wind bled all over me atop that faux-marble bench that smelled of old jeans and chapstick, and I watched above as thumbtacks slowly made open holes through the blue buckshot canvas. If just one of those thousand flashlights from faraway worlds would drown me in light, shine down like a streetlamp to lead me through the fog and coming darkness-- then with sleepless eyes as red as Sand Creek's soil and dreams of half-moons and silhouetted strangers, for one moment, just one brief moment, I could be where I intended. So I sat up and forgot my dilemmas and started home-- but then saw the pencil positioned between my feet: long and black with bite marks, a blunt tip and a worn top. I wondered how many graphite scars its eraser had stolen-- how many were mistakes, misconceptions, or curses, love notes, drawings, letters or poetry. I wondered how many more nine-thirty nights I would pedal my bike across mown lawns, with the sprinklers' bite ready to startle me and the crickets humming along until I begin to rotate with the earth. How many more times would my eyes blink before admitting defeat?--closing for good, recalling only the pinpoint memories created by those flashlamps, those streetbulbs, Arcturus and the others. Would the rabid amusements of genius and catastrophe be lost? Would this one dark pencil contain enough of its black-match lead to record all I was worthy of remembering? But then I understood that remembrances are only there for those that are in need of them-- and so I cast the pencil away. And I sat at a bus stop to wait, to sleep until 6 AM arrived and signaled the end of the buzzing electric lights around me that laughed so loud in the night, ruling over the crickets. |
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Mark Ross
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How can I strike my words against your sweet, inspiring shape and sculpt the worthy likeness with their true and poignant thrust, when feckless tools that, thrown upon the task, just simply break and gently fall to paper, spent, like clouds of chisel dust? Impervious to my approach, you're trapped in porphyry; defying allegory's gouge and riffler's metric sway, and even trite maquettes whose fleeting promise teases me soon break beneath the clumsy, cumbrous hand of my cliché. The multitude of metaphors, like fireflies evening flight, shine bright against my consciousness inviting lucid prose, but at my words' approach they disappear, a ghostly sight that leaves me fixed, ironically, in Rodin's pensive pose. My struggle to define you leaves me swimming in the sand I blame my tools but wiser men see weakness of the hand. |
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Carole Trickett
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A swirl of purple and gold as the barn swallows gather on telephone lines that reach from my house to the neighbor's fading red barn. Each August they perch in long columns. Are they waiting for another? Are they drilling for the long flight home? Their congregation, enigmatic, their departure abrupt. |
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Laurie Cuneo
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