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[aslant]

i just found out i won another poetry.com poetry prize, for $1000. i can use this prize to pay off the taxes i owe for last year's $10000 prize! it's poetic justice! ha ha. but yes, exciting stuff. it's getting to the point where their company is a major supplemental source of income for me.

Aquifer


Here it is, Winter, and familiar sidewalks
are unfamiliar, are puckered with cold,
buckling and tripping up your boot heels.
This ice that possesses concrete
has seeped up from the aquifer, they say,
through soil through clay
through unmapped bedrock.

Swim down, swim into it, half-frozen
and blind in the dark. Here you will find it,
the armies of water that amass in their subterranean caves,
that follow unseen veins up to the sidewalks
and push up the bricks with the frost.
They say there is water underground, they say this,
but you want to see it: the roots of buried ice
that clutch winter roads and crack them
as easily as ice shatters the brittle,
enfolded tree limbs. Winter does not sleep.
You have seen it, how water breaks earth,
reaps breakage from the earth, an unseen insurgence,
a blind thing made wild, made king.

...

not sure how i feel about line breaks & a few other things. they are sending a proof for corrections, and i'm not even sure that the above version is the one i sent in. this is the newest version of it, a more publishable version, i suppose. like the last one that won, i'm not even certain i like it (am i ever sure?). at least, it feels sloppy, unexamined. who are 'they' meant to be? i don't know. and all my poems are winter poems. why? unclear.

Comments

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

way to work it!!! you rule completely. i'm trippin' on yer imagery.

[aslant.livejournal.com]

thank you :)