2017 Spring Contest, Theme – Oregon/Pacific NW: 3rd Place Winner

These poems were submitted for the spring 2017 contest themed category judged by Charles Goodrich, but were omitted from Verseweavers 22. Any future reprints of Verseweavers 22 will include the Oregon/Pacific Northwest category. They will also be Included in the upcoming Verseweavers 23 to be published late spring 2019.

Friday Afternoon
by Michael Hanner

After making love
we lay there catawampus,
adrift in the rumpled cotton dunes.
Above the half curtain
gray sky and upside down
the top of a Douglas fir swaying.
Crows grasp upper branches
to arrest themselves
lest they fall further into the sky.

Judge’s comment: I like the artful topsy-turvying of both physical and psychical space here, the interweaving of indoor and outdoor landscape, the playful reflections of humans and birds, sky and earth. A lovely derangement of the senses.

Michael Hanner is an architect whose poems are found in Nimrod, Cloudbank, Mudfish, Rhino, Southern Humanities Review, Gargoyle, C.A.B., Cascadia Review and others. He is the author of chapbooks: Palm Sunday, Winter Dreams, The Architecture of Holland, Confessions of Autumn and Avenida Uriburu. His books are Vivaldi, an autobiography, 2012, October, 2015 and Adriatica, 2016. He has written non-fiction articles for several periodicals and a guidebook, Le Bugue, Black Périgord & Beyond under the name Forbisher Mandangle. He loves Toni Hanner plus travel, gardening, irony, English croquet, French cooking, Argentine tango and photography.

 

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