Blood Pudding Press is delighted to announce its 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees!
The press has chosen to nominate one poem from each of the three poetry chapbooks published by Blood Pudding
Press this year.
The nominees are listed below followed by their nominated poems.
Congratulations to Lauren Gordon, Matthew J. Hall, and Nicole Rollender for these Pushcart Prize nominations.
***
O Tennyson! Tennyson!
what is good and wild
in my country
nine miserable
Nellies from New York whose fathers sell
goods on God’s grass
her brother is alive and warm with two
hands and no one
knows why but God, God hates
weather, weeds,
heart, finally, round as a Christmas orange
crisp as an oyster
cracker fished from a woolen winter pocket
you never saw two
boys picked up dead and raped naked by a tornado
never knew another
word for Indian or an outhouse hole of biting
flies, tiny graves in
cellars or oh, that kind black doctor
with medicinal
powders and the hair of your parents still grows
long after they’re
under find a prayer to fix to water a calling card
with trailing flowers
a bonnet that keeps slipping blue smoke cat tails
in your hoops, good
and wild, one dead child, one loam son for everyone
(from the chapbook Fiddle Is Flood by
Lauren Gordon)
***
The
Pigeons and the Peace Dove
my apologies are short lived and
dim
like headlights of a passing car
reflecting off gutter puddles
from yesterday’s rain
I wanted to be sincere
but anxiety hurls my goodwill at
the wall
and laughs and cuts us with the
shards
I should have collected all the
tears
I have pulled from your eyes
taken them back and choked on the
poison
the olive branch has withered
and fallen to the ground between
us
the peace dove is twitching down
there
her feathers are dirty like those
of the pigeon
and the pain I have handed you
freely
and the embarrassment of sharing
my tarnished reputation
and the band of abuse
all run too deeply
and though it may not be worth a
damn
I do love you and I am sorry
(from the chapbook Pigeons
and Peace Doves by Matthew J. Hall)
***
Disassembling
The disassembling: remember when
we pulled apart moths,
first
clapping them between our hands, to stun
their flight? Pulling off one dusty wing,
wrenching the other. Dropping the torsos
in the stream, the water performed the final kill.
Was
there an opening the illumined moth
slipped through? Or, did it sink
to
be eaten? Or both, the way your remains
lowered
in, collapses into earth,
and
some other part of you enters and exits
by
the ear. The drum shivers as you hum.
Your hair grows longer. The hip is something
no longer examined in the light.
We speak the language of departure.
One word to you is love.
To me it’s ruin. Or a declaration of war,
the moth wing your delicate,
plucked scalp.
(from
the chapbook Bone of My Bone by Nicole Rollender)
Posts
