November 2017

Cosmonaut’s Lament   Above her head the stars, bleary in their watchfulness   Under her feet black offal, of metal tang and smoke and char   Contrails unspool like strands of hair in zero G and the cosmonaut thinks of earthbound tidepools   little pockets of life where there should be no life   Of

Disturbance Theory at HJ Andrews Experimental Forest [gview file=”https://oregonpoets.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/DisturbanceTheoryCorrected.pdf”] Judge’s comments I thought a lot about meaning as I read these poems. I thought about how language creates meaning, how humans create language, and how, despite how frail the letters words are made of, how inadequate the sounds of words are to represent the wide

Honorable mentions: 1st Honorable Mention: “Who Will Be Sent” by Laurel Benjamin, Albany, CA 2nd Honorable Mention: “A Thousand Resting Stars” by Alan Contreras, Eugene, OR 3rd Honorable Mention: “A Commanding Position in the World” by Susan Whitney, Eugene, OR   —Shaindel Beers

The Greatest Show on Earth Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, 1919–2017   Grandma said the circus came to town by train, paraded through the streets to the fairgrounds   tigers in horse-drawn cages, clowns, a man on stilts, a brass band, acrobats in spangled costumes;   the children tugged at their parents’ hands to

Off Old Hwy. 99 Old men fill the donut shop this morning, every morning, talking politics in   matched pairs; they agree about the state of things, which is much worse than it used to be   when they were as young as the girl at the glass case deciding on which donut she  

Another Perspective on the Nuclear Codes   Imagine looking down from the space station as the blue-green earth turns beneath and the mushrooms bloom silently along the Florida panhandle, the ox head shape of France, the teardrop of Africa; bloom like gray mums along the Nev, follow the Rhine (obliterate the Rhine), rise silently from

Honorable mentions: 1st Honorable Mention: “Creation Story” by Toni Hanner, Eugene, OR 2nd Honorable Mention: “Salt-and-Pepper Villanelle” by Danny Earl Simmons, Lebanon, OR 3rd Honorable Mention: “Detective Chief Inspectors” by Dan Kaufman, Central Point, OR       Judge’s comments To prepare, I read villanelles by Bishop, Dunn, Kees, and Levertov. Then I looked in

Imagining Mrs. R who died at 114, according to her obituary          My husband died in 1963. He sold insurance (auto, fire, life). Before we met I taught geometry,   nursed ginger ales in Newark speakeasies. Bent-elbowed friends recruited me to drive. My husband died in 1963,   his second heart attack, and Kennedy was