We here at Rapid River Magazine always like to provide a forum for our local and regional poets. This year’s contest winners are unique, diverse, and talented. As always, we thank each and every person who submitted work, and encourage them to continue writing. We hope you enjoy these poems as much as we did.

First Place Winner

Widow

What mischief the wind
whips up
Ordering and reordering
sky’s vapors,
Fashioning strange shapes
in foamy grey white
While sun melts
to oily light
Staining firs
that rim the sky.

On the way there
where
Sun smells different
through bright air
There
Where she sits
in robed silence
Staring at nothing,
the massive wall clock
Clicking out seconds
of her still moments,
Pricking the quiet
in tocks
That mimic her heartbeat:
Tireless glass meter
measuring a life.

She articulates notice
of blankness,
Of sameness
of days
That have somehow
blurred
To decades,
Swallowed
in a warm grey cave
Walled by ghosts
Floored
with phantom steps of kin
And keen elegance
Where once she had
busy breaths
Of bright unruly children
and days of difference.
Here now, the enormity
of small tasks
And time that won’t stay put.
What crawled away
in the night this time?
Was it a hand
or a foot?
Or something more useful
that at dawn
Turned to earth?

Memories are voiceless.
Only the clock
asserts its diligence
To a deaf room
Mute as a tomb
but for the glass heart
On the wall
that, bloodless, looms
And today
no one comes,
No one at all.

~ Kirsten M. Walz

Second Place Winner

The Hills Are Green and Fresh

After rain I wander slowly
across the graveyard and
grant immortality for
an hour of remembering.

Miss Hettie, whose fingernails with ridges
were beautiful to a first grader, and
Mrs. Kingery, Sunday School teacher,
who comforted an orphaned four-year-old,
lie near the hill’s crest. I am joined

by Cousin Eugene who says Billy Joe,
the naughty boy who used an art class jar
when Miss Lavonia said he “could not
leave the room,” survived Pearl Harbor
on the USS North Carolina, fought on
for four years, came back a broken man.

We remember the War and how all
of us left then, the first of
our folks to leave the hills.

They are here, Mother, Daddy, Aunt Madge,
Tom, Grandpa, Uncle Lon, Aunt Pearl.
The gravestones speak memories
as the reluctant sun sets.

At Lois’s we eat strawberries
washed with love,
sweetened by rain.

~ Lenore McComas Coberly

Third Place Winner

Another Thanksgiving

My mother wasn’t there.
She would have loathed the talk
Twenty percent discounts
a friend of a friend could
squeeze you in
cash in your miles
three trips for the price of one
Atlantic City, Disneyworld, Vegas

Next month they leave for Florida
they got this great deal
So now the task of eating
everything left in their fridge back home
and describing in unsparing detail
how their car will join them on the car train.

My mother wasn’t there
for the stirring at the stove
the carving at the board
the unmolding of the jello
the two kinds of stuffing
the crisp and the soggy

And yet she was,
angered anew by interruptions
from multiple cellphones,
virtual switchboard from hell

My father wasn’t there
either and yet he was
as I drank his seven
glasses of Scotch and
wine and mouthed
unflattering commentary
beneath my breath.

~  Fran Ghee Ross