SHP Annual Chapbook Contest Winners

Thank you to all the authors who entered the 2023 Slapering Hol Press (SHP) Poetry Chapbook Contest.

This year’s winning chapbook manuscript is THE WAY BACK by Russell Karrick. Russell Karrick is a poet/translator living between New York and Colombia. He has won translation awards from World Literature Today and Lunch Ticket. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from Bat City Review, The Offing, Spoon River Poetry Review, Blue Earth Review, Magma Poetry, and Stone Canoe, among others.

 From THE WAY BACK

 

THE FEAST OF ST. ANTHONY

Sweet basil and grilled sardines infused the streets. In Alfama,
I took your hand as we slipped through the crowd, past the pop-up bars
while lovers gathered at San Ingreja de Santo António.
We’d met the day before at the hostel, both unaware of the feast
until we arrived. We wandered the city for hours; you told me
about a blue town you loved in Morocco, and how you saw your father’s
ghost on a cliff in Algarve. We talked about a pilgrim route up the coast
and how I spent two weeks in the Black Forest walking off a divorce.
The following night, we listened to a woman sing fado––her hands
rose from her belly to her chest, formed fists that shook the air.
Fado means fate, from the Latin fatum for what’s been spoken.
When St. Anthony’s words fell on deaf ears he preached by the shore.
That night we saw a shoal of silver fish flash under the half moon.

First published in Lily Poetry Review

 

2023 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Finalist: Gabriel Furshong

Gabriel Furshong‘s poetry has recently appeared at Westerly, PRISM International, Ruminate, Big Sky Journal, and other publications. A correspondent at Montana Quarterly, he writes for The Nation, Yes! Magazine, The American Prospect, and elsewhere. He lives in Helena, Montana with his wife and two children.

From THINGS NOT TO BE SAID

 

ORPHANS

At the river
choked with trash
children point and shriek

A cow’s placenta dangles
dribbles blood on plastic bottles
empty bags of chips

 

In the nursery
children scatter
on the stairs
on the couch

Two more
on the kitchen floor
watch Elena do
one thing at a time

 

Headlights slice the rancid road
into pieces after dark

Men curse beneath a truck
cigarettes and motor oil

Women shuffle in the dust
fifty-pound sacks of fruit

 

The shepherd dead asleep
in a wheelbarrow

Everyone untethered
the calf nowhere in sight

 

First published in Drunk Monkeys

 

2023 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Finalist: Olivia Sokolowski

Olivia Sokolowski is a poet pursuing her PhD at Florida State University. She earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and her undergraduate degree at Berry College. She’s currently at work on her first poetry collection and a science fiction novel. You can find Olivia online at oliviasoko.com.

From MIRTH, BLISS, ICING

 

PONT DES ARTS

And here in the clearing is where you find
the cluster of red berries in the shape of a human heart.
You remember a friend pulling off
her shirt to reveal a new tattoo: an outline
of the whole world she planned to color in
with each country she visited. How still
she’d need to hold to let the needle do its work
under the hands of so many strangers. Dropping
a curtain over each memory, sealing it
into the skin. The mathematics of her heart
was so tangible, then—she wanted it easy
to pick up the receiver and fall back, back into

the chair, and here is where you fall back
into the fruit of spring at nineteen, standing chilly
on the Pont des Arts. Your college boyfriend
fingers the slim brass lock, blacks in your initials.
You know this was the first metal bridge
in Paris, once dismantled and rebuilt. The river
remembered its place. This is the bridge which accrued
45 tons of these locks, a beehive of them fettering
the light on their inscriptions: Jacob, Laura,
Marnie, Boris, Adriana. This is the memory
that went tawdry when its sick muse dissipated

until you heard the news the bridge was stripped.
Its branches couldn’t bear those heavy cherries––
some melted down now, others sold at auction,
the shotty bargain of their signateurs released.
These mistakes are weightless! the auctioneer laughed
as he hefted a square of them to the block. That’s when
a little fruit in your heart reddened up, the final
note sliding into vermillion. You still feel it
now, don’t you? How the Seine is running,
running, still holding, rusting its lovers’ keys?

First published in Lake Effect

 

Thank you to all the authors who entered the 2022 Slapering Hol Press (SHP) Poetry Chapbook Contest.

This year’s winning chapbook manuscript is BONE WISHING by Tara Flint Taylor. Tara was awarded 2nd place in the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest. She was a finalist in 2018 for the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the 2014 River Styx International Poetry Contest, the Inkwell Poetry Contest, and the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College where she earned her BA, and of North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA. Tara is the recipient of a John LaHey Award in Writing as well as a Newhouse Writing Award and in 2010 was awarded the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

 

 

DEAD RINGER

A shush of the flag

as it folds itself in the wind.

Like a scene freeze framed, holding

your horses tight by the reins, knuckles

bone white, and veined

as an insect’s wing.

We used to play dead

in the dead of summer

suffocating from humidity, stifled

for a child’s hour or more

on the front lawn, or back porch

until one of us got up for a popsicle.

Once and just once–I can remember

my mother called from the house

and we ignored her.  Pretended not to hear.

She called my name as she came running.

From the window I suppose I did look stung

by a bee and dead, heat stroke and dead.

She screamed our names again and again.

I was smiling. I thought it was funny.  This joke.

A mother on her knees, saying Don’t you ever!

Ever do that again. Don’t ever do that

to me. Don’t even pretend to die on me.

 

First published in Poet Lore.

 

2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Runner Up

From THE WAY BACK, Russell Karrick

 

THE DOVE

When we walk home at night in Medellín

you still move closer if a motorcycle

approaches and I think of Botero’s Pájaro––

its back and belly blown out.

When you were younger, leaving the city

meant risking kidnap. But now, in Cocora Valley,

you lead the way through the jungle.

The local tourists stay below the cloud forest on horseback

or in the parking lot posing for pictures.

At Finca La Montaña, bearded limbs and bright

flowers flare against the hills.

In the low valley, wax palms pierce

the wispy clouds and the slow glow of vermilion

steeps through the mist. I think again

of Botero’s bird, Pájaro de Paz, whole and untroubled,

perched next to its mangled twin.

 

First published in Lily Review.

 

2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Runner Up

From NOT THE FIRST GIRL, Rebecca Bornstein 

 

ALTERNATE ENDING WITH BEACH HOUSE

This is what I wanted:

                                      mug full of coffee each morning

                                      and a walk to the ocean. Wind blowing sand

                                      into the curtain hems

of your parents’ beach house where we wouldn’t pay rent

and you’d reprise your role as the good son who spent

the six months before I met you there, sober,

fixing the cherry red Cabriolet.

                                     Garage full of oil spots.

Your face growing wrinkles from deep concentration,

stub of a Camel dangling ash from the crook

of your mouth. I wanted the floral apron, the chubby baby

on my hip, and the cold leftovers I’d eat alone in the kitchen.

                                       I knew you’d never quit drinking,

                                      so I worked it into the ending,

                                      amber glow of lamplight

through Maker’s in the wood-panelled den.

                                      But in my version, you’d drink moderately,

or at least from glasses, and we’d listen to the baby monitor

and make slow love, which I knew even then

                                      would really be more like absent-minded fucking.

But that’s as far as I can picture of the alternate ending

because in this world, when you begged me to marry you

from the passenger seat of my Buick, I knew you were drunk,

                                     and the pregnancy test

                                     came back with only one line on it,

                                     and I never even saw the beach house,

only drove the long flat road

                                    toward it a half dozen times.

 

First published in Lunch Ticket

 

2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Finalist

From COMING HOME, Angela Siew

 

MY FATHER’S GUITAR

He practices in front of a mirror

behind the stand he brought 

from Hong Kong forty years ago—

rust circling the joints, 

the arms delicately fanned open, 

one tilting to the side.

It holds a theory book with songs 

named for speed: Minuet, Andante, Allegretto. 

But he doesn’t look, 

plays only scales, steadily up and down, 

returning to missed notes. 

He must learn what he has forgotten—

hunched over a computer for years, 

pounding on keys, the hard noise 

absorbing into the flat board.

But my father no longer hears 

the strings that need replacing, 

the shrill tweak of the high notes,

the low loose string splaying out.

He must see the deep wrinkles 

of his hands and wrists as they bend and flex, 

forming, shifting, crawling up the guitar neck, 

feel the rhythm of vibrations against the bridge 

and his ear’s damaged cords, 

against his heart’s irregular pulse. 

My father plays his guitar every night. 

He doesn’t sing, or strum with a marbled pick. 

It seems so long ago, the afternoons when I knelt

by the case, clicked open the silver clasps, and pretended

to turn the knobs on the pointed head, 

traced down the length of each string, 

plucking them above the hole of the body.

 

First published in Rock & Sling.

 

2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Finalist

From WAR FOOD, Milica Mijatović

 

STRAWBERRIES

We ate them in the field by the stream

after old man Jocika passed. Funerals,

something we were good at. Someone

made a joke about Jocika’s mangled hands,

the way he would pretend to eat his fingers,

master of the noses & thumbs game.

He used to make us laugh. He used to tell us

stories about how he lost his fingers, each

finger a different story, and each story

different every time. The ring on his ring finger

choked his finger to death; he woke one morning

to a missing thumb, searched for days, found

it in his backyard, riddled with ants; he won

first place in a pinky finger beauty contest,

was asked to sit still for a mold, couldn’t wait

long, so he cut his pinky off, donated it,

and now it sits in all its glory in a museum

in Helsinki. His contribution to western society.

We grew up when we realized what actually

happened to his hands, and sometime after,

his heart burst, the same way strawberries do

when you bite into them just right.

 

First published in the Louisville Review.

 

2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Finalist

From IN THE SPILL, Judith Camann

 

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER I STILL STUTTER WHEN I HEAR PACHELBEL’S CANON IN D MAJOR

        for Brooks

I eat breakfast                                        over

the porcelain sink                               white

 

toast crumbs fall from my fingertips 

to the green Formica countertop

next to the coffee stain

 

I eat breakfast                                   listening

to the answering machine

 

                                                                  beep beep beep

its red light winks

the cord spirals a #2 pencil

a crumpled recall notice in the recycle 

NPR airs Reflections from the Keyboard

 

errant popcorn kernel

behind the flour canister

                                                             can ister         can sister         can sitter

                                                             can sit her     can’t sit her     can’t sit here

 

                                                             can’t stay here

                                                                                        can’t stay

                                                                                                           can’t stay here

 

can’t wait             behind the flour canister

on a green Formica countertop 

next to a black coffee stain.

 

I think of your best man              ring

 

safe in his pocket.                             The organist

                                                                                                  plays an uncued repetition.

 

First published in Adanna Literary Journal

 

Thank you to all the authors who entered the 2021 Slapering Hol Press (SHP) Poetry Chapbook Contest.

This year’s winning chapbook manuscript is MOTHER KINGDOM by Andrea Deeken. Andrea was born in rural Missouri and has lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of her adult life. She holds a BA from Drake University and an MS in Writing and Publishing from Portland State University. Her writing has appeared in The Cereal Box Review, Periphery, The Bear Deluxe, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The Blue Mountain Review. Awards include Richard Hugo House Writing Contest First Place; Arts and Letters Creative Nonfiction Finalist; and Honorable Mention in the 2019 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize Contest, among others. Most recently, she received second place in the 2020 Blue Mountain Review LGBTQ Chapbook Contest.  A former book editor, she has worked in libraries for more than ten years. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her wife and daughter.

Evolution

Was it when I followed my father to the fields

his back hunched, searching for arrowheads

my feet sinking in the newly turned earth?

Or was it seeing my mother from the doorway

her back waning crescent in the dark?

Words came easily to me then

alone with paper, my mind a sweet shadow,

time a soft blanket around my shoulders.

But coming out my mouth they choked

and stumbled, my face the crushed 

color of cherries stuck

to the bottom of a boot.

When I told my father I was gay he was chopping

radishes, their red skins half moons

on the cutting board, little gleams of white

a promise worth keeping.

His careful hands slicing, their rough wintered edges

that held so many things: dogs, babies,

stones the color of starlight,

my wild heart, beating

the knife’s calm rhythm, What can I fix you to eat?

My mother was not so easy,

her face pinched pale in the thick dark

of her bedroom, thin covers a moat 

of righteous limbs and I the only sinner.

Even now, all these years later, my heart closes

when I hear her voice.

Today it’s cold but the crocuses are coming up,

ochre pollen petals small as thimbles.

Soon the geese will head back north,

their black wings cutting through soundless cloud.

— Andrea Deeken, originally published by Spoon River Poetry Review (2019)

The runner-up is SHE HAS DREAMT AGAIN OF WATER by Stephanie Niu. Stephanie is a poet from Marietta, Georgia who earned her degrees in symbolic systems and computer science from Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in The Southeast Review, Poets Reading the News, Storm Cellar, and Portland Review. She works as a product manager in New York City.

Midden/ Appetite

My mother calls herself our trash heap.

She eats what we won’t, grows plump 

on our leftover eggs, bread crusts,

the bitter-hearted lotus seeds we cannot stomach.

We have small appetites. Waiting for us is eating,

cutting slice after slice of pumpkin bread

until all the bowls are clean.

No one wants to be garbage, she says,

but look what I do for you.

In archaeology a trash heap is called a midden.

It means you’ve struck gold. What better map

to the way people lived than the things they discarded.

Oysters shells, chicken bones, bits of green glass,

cups, bowls, pickle forks, shoe leather

miraculously intact beneath the dirt.

The trash is what they ate, what they used,

what they could not afford to throw away.

No buttons. No jewelry. In a California midden

where Chinese laborers lived they found

a single bottle for baby formula, cracked.

The glass so old it is flaking, iridescent,

like spilt oil or dragonfly wings catching light.

My mother does not like the way she looks.

In the dressing room she pinches the flesh

around her face. If someone loved me more,

maybe I wouldn’t gain weight.

When a whale dies and sinks to the sea floor,

a world emerges to devour it. Hagfish come first,

faceless mouths chewing at the skin.

Then larger fish, sharks even, their eyes

rolling as they tear into the flesh.

A fallen whale sustains this ecosystem for years.

Even its skeleton becomes a home.

My mother talks of death often— her knees hurt,

she cannot sleep, her eyes worsen each day.

Put my body in the earth, she says,

breaking sunflower seeds after dinner.

I do not want to become food.

— Stephanie Niu, originally published by Portland Review (2020)

 

This year’s finalists are:

PLANT by Bonnie Jill Emanuel 

PRAYER DOWN DEPOT ROAD

I can’t sleep, America.

The coal cars vibrate, bulky

behind the roadhouse where I stay,

drum by the room at midnight.

At one. Rattle past this insomnia.

A yellow moon stares in the windows.

Spotlight on dreams twisted in a cotton bedcover.

The yellow moon over the railroad shed 

shines down the lanky clotheslines,

across cornfields that look like glory

look like patchwork brown flags.

I can’t sleep, America.

I can’t sleep as if anything matters.

Sing me a song yellow moon.

An enamel fan, painted-chipped,

whirs the smell of diesel mixed with the sea—

an America poem       poem     

                            poem

blowing in & out of my face.

— Bonnie Jill Emanuel, originally published in Midwest Review 5

QUERIDAS TIAS by Luisa Caycedo-Kimura 

El Jardín de las Tías 

the ants crawled on our bodies 

when we least expected

bit and burned 

as they went along 

a child dozed beneath the bed 

in a soiled diaper     mamá cried 

and looked for him

snails disappeared under clovers 

violets decorated our arms 

and we hid behind leaves

large and green

like the ones in the bible 

in the ferns     a fallen hibiscus

in the armoire     mother’s mother’s

bones     removed from the earth

before i was born   

ash wednesday     mamá and tías 

prayed the rosary     césar said 

abuela must be happy

in heaven without her stiff legs 

mario buried a tibia by a guava tree 

tía adela screamed 

niños mocosos how could you

her fingers left scarlet marks 

on our arms     the maids

gave us soursop juice     told us the story

of a woman who drowned 

her children     wept for them

by the river every night

three o’clock     the house was calm

because there was no papá

— Luisa Cayedo-Kimura, originally published by Mid-American Review, Volume XXXV, No. 1, 35th Anniversary Issue

THAT DARK CENTER by Lisa Rosinsky 

Labor

Today your dad and grandpa are fixing the deck
while I watch from the nursing chair. 
Curled against my chest, you sleep

as close as you can get to the warm belly 
that carried you crammed among 

my organs until you came wailing 
out between my legs. “Came out”—
I mean to say, I pushed you,

with muscles that still ache
two months later. There was blood,

vomit, excrement. To be away from you
makes me frantic—my body knows
what’s missing, aches for you as urgently

as you root for the nipple. Visceral:
from viscus, internal, intestinal,

stickiness, heft: your small weight on my chest
while your father and his father rip up the old boards,
strip the rot, pound nails, sturdying

this house against the coming snows.
That would be the easy place to end

the poem: a new family shoring itself up,
cozy, safe. But that isn’t where it ends.
Nothing just comes into this world.

Your heartbeats echo on my breastbone
as you sleep, our muscles

pumping blood we used to share. 
My body will pull towards you always now,
as my mother’s did, and my mother’s

mother’s, and nothing is what it was before. 

— Lisa Rosinksy, originally published by Beltway Poetry Quarterly

ONE LIFE TO LIVE by Cynthia White 

Ward

From her private room in detox, 

my mother’s view is solid 

philodendron. Fronds like green shields.

In the submarine light, we speak selectively—

Philip Roth, the sweet final films of Truffaut. 

Today, I watch a beetle trundle up a fleshy stalk,

armored and unswerving. He’s straight out of her

delirium with wicked little horns. My mother

wears a silver shamrock to ward off evil,

swallows whatever she’s given. 

I never could protect her.

She eyes the beetle, raps twice on the glass. 

— Cynthia White, originally published by The Adroit Journal (2021)

BLUE by Connor Poff

CANALS

After Garth Brooks’ “The River”

I struggle with the sentiment that a dream

encircles us—that the river, the Great 

Miami, once sustained us, 

once was a force greater than a graveyard 

for driftwood,

grocery bags,

          used tires. 

Beyond us, the river ascends, becomes

the Ohio River, Mississippi River, Gulf 

of Mexico, an ocean with unexplored depths.

Here, it flows mostly into stagnant canals, 

scars carved into town by industry’s

descent, after outsourced steel and paper 

nullified the need for freight transport.

Undrinkable, the dream trickles out

beside our streets, in a horseshoe bordering

the community park, and floating in it: 

algae blooms, 

Pepsi cans,

                 used needles.

— Connor Poff, originally published by Volney Road Review (2019)

 

 

Thank you to all the authors who entered the 2020 Slapering Hol Press (SHP) Poetry Chapbook Contest.

This year’s winning chapbook manuscript is UBASUTE, by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura. He is a poet and visual artist. He is the author of two poetry collections: Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, and the full-length collection Common Grace, forthcoming from Beacon Press in Fall 2022. His honors include a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, upstreet, Verse Daily, DMQ Review, Poet Lore, The Night Heron  Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017).

“I knew there was something special about Slapering Hol Press when I first read their chapbook competition guidelines. The care and respect the press has for writers was clearly evident. I couldn’t have been happier with my experience and the way my chapbook turned out. The editors, advisory committee, and staff were all wonderful—encouraging, supportive, generous—and continue to be so.”

— Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

 

 

 

Thank you to all the authors who entered the 2019 Slapering Hol Press (SHP) Poetry Chapbook Contest. This year’s winning chapbook manuscript is They Become Stars, a harrowing and lyrical account of the Holocaust. We are proud to welcome Liz Marlow as a Slapering Hol Press poet. Her poetry has been published in Body,Flyway, Glass, and Permafrost Magazine. She lives in Germantown, Tennessee with her husband and children.

The first 2019 SHP Chapbook runner-up is Opening the Hive by Amanda Moore. Amanda Moore’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Best New Poets, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and she is the recipient of writing awards from The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She received her MFA from Cornell University, where she served as Managing Editor for EPOCH magazine and a lecturer in the John S. Knight Writing Institute. A high school English teacher, Amanda lives by the beach with her husband and daughter in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.

Our second runner-up is Riddles of Flock and Bone by W. J. Herbert. Herbert was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, Second Prize in the Morton Marr Poetry Competition, and was selected as finalist in the Atlanta Review, Arts and Letters, American Literary Review, Madison Review, and Flyway Literary Prizes. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews appear, or are forthcoming, in Alaska Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Boulevard, Best American Poetry 2017, Salamander, Southwest Review, and others. She lives in Portland, Maine.

The 2019 SHP Finalists are:

• BECAUSE I KNOW YOU KNOW THIS DARKNESS by Amanda Moore
• DEAD/NOT DEAD by Pamela Carter

They Become Stars was published in March 2020. Contest entrants receive a 30% discount from the cover price. For more information about this publication or for details about the 2020 SHP contest please call us at 914-332-5953, e-mail [email protected].

You can buy SHP chapbooks in our bookstore.

Rebecca Doverspike is the winner of the 2018 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition with Every Present Thing a Ghost.

Rebecca Doverspike is currently finishing an Mdiv at Harvard Divinity School focused on Buddhism and interfaith hospital chaplaincy. She grew up in the Wisconsin, wherein began a lifelong love for trees, books, deep conversations, long walks, and bike rides. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from West Virginia University. Her chapbook, Every Present Thing a Ghost, was published in March 2019 by Slapering Hol Press. Previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ruminate, Leveler, Souvenir Lit Journal, Midwest Review, Valley Voices, and Periphery among others. While studying in Boston she has also loved hiking in the White Mountains, practicing at Greater Boston Zen Center, and walking her dog on old streets where roots crack through the brick. Upon graduation she will continue chaplaincy training in a residency program at Massachusetts General Hospital.

 

You can buy this and other SHP chapbooks in our bookstore.

Lillo Way is the winner of the 2017 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition with Dubious Moon.

Lillo Way’s poetry collection, “Lend Me Your Wings,” described by Ellen Bass as “rich in music and in imagination…a celebration and a joy”, was released July 2021 by Shanti Arts Publishing. Her chapbook, “Dubious Moon,” won the Hudson Valley Writers Center’s Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have won the E.E. Cummings Award and a Florida Review Editors’ Prize. Her writing has appeared in New Letters, Poet Lore, Tampa Review, Louisville Review, Poetry East, among others. Way has received grants from the NEA, NY State Council on the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for her choreographic work involving poetry. www.lilloway.com

 

You can buy this and other SHP chapbooks in our bookstore.

 

Dubious Moon

The moon’s grown fat and I’m suspicious
because several stars have gone missing,
the sky’s an evil shade of black,
and someone’s stolen every leaf, leaving
nothing but bleached tree-skeletons
pointing bony fingers at the culprit.
Some people claim they’ve never seen the moon
perfectly full. But I’ve caught it that way
countless times, like tonight. Those of us
with poor eyesight are the beneficiaries
of such gifts. Without my glasses, I get seven
moons overlapping. An embarrassment of moons.
Looking through the edge of my glasses,
the upper curve of moon is scarlet
and the bottom is blue. I get prism moons
into the blind bargain.
The lake below is a sparkling mess,
a waste bin for phosphorescent fallen stars
and the mirrored moon causes a blinding glare,
as if I needed one.

 

—Lillo Way, originally published in The Meadow, 2017

Finalists

The Editors and the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee congratulate the 2017 Finalists for their fine work:

 

Glean by Patrick James Errington

Patrick James Errington is a poet and translator from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. His poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2016, The Iowa Review, West Branch, Diagram, Copper Nickel, Horsethief, and Boston Review. Most recently, he won The London Magazine Poetry Prize, 2016, and was highly commended in The 2016 National Poetry Competition (UK). His French translation of PJ Harvey’s The Hollow of the Hand, with Laure Gall, was published by Éditions l’Âge d’Homme in 2017. Patrick currently lives in Scotland, where he is a doctoral researcher at the University of St Andrews.

 

Schrodinger’s Mistress 

To see the world is to still it. I watch
you, rising, watermarked, from the bath
and I offer you a towel and
permanence. Your hands aflicker
over your body, but you are always
rising to me; in the smallest
motes of you there’s still such
possibility. You are received. The mirror
takes you in like a mother, folding
you. If I squint, the light lights
like dust on your shoulders, heavy
enough to bend. Famished
of tense, could you have been anything
but brittle? Feel the warp of breath.
But a season exists without, the bathwater
set into place, mortise and tendon, by our
leaving, rippled because only you
have felt it lick your ankles. Tense
collapses around us—but you, you’re still
rising. Beyond your body, the sun
sinks, ponderous with everything
you have been, will be, bear. Promise
me, somewhere, a girl
is still committing a small act
of love, quietly, cruelly
in the dark that will last forever.

—Patrick James Errington, originally published in the Flambard International Prize Prizewinner’s Anthology (University of Newcastle Press, 2015)

 

But Pink, But Want, But Blue by Sara Ryan

Sara Ryan is a second-year poetry MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University and an associate poetry editor for Passages North. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Storm Cellar, Tinderbox, Slice Magazine, New South, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review, and The Blueshift Journal.

 

Pantoum for Dark Lands

after Aase Berg

it is my fear that tears apart the place.

apart the strange, apart the fat rose

in its muddy bed. tears the cave in two.

a wild hare bleats until its neck bleeds.

apart the strange, apart the fat rose

unraveling its petals into glass. this:

a wild hare bleats until its neck bleeds.

a catastrophe that has already happened—

unraveling its petals into glass. this:

avoiding it. bringing it back and dissecting it,

the catastrophe that has already happened,

where I forget all the dead animals.

avoiding it. bringing it back and dissecting it—

it is my fear that tears apart the place,

where I forget all the dead animals

in their muddy beds. tearing the cave in two.

—Sara Ryan, originally published at Tinderbox Poetry Journal (tinderboxpoetry.com)

Milksop Codicil, by Spree MacDonald, is the winner of the 2016 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. 

 

Into the ‘headwaters of hurt’ is where Spree MacDonald takes us, between branches that overhang and roots that trip, with a jambalaya of words and references that in the end prove the only way out of here. This writer uses his own weaknesses, his ‘blunder toe,’ to navigate a treacherous landscape, bringing the whole country to bear witness to the swamp living in its belly. At play with sound and music, he charges into this ‘labor hood of Atlantis,’ this ‘poorly lit paradise.’ Here is a spirit, wise, but not jaded, chided, but not overruled. Milksop Codicil is a poetic trance, full of bayou magic, and common sense.

—Mervyn Taylor, author of The Waving Gallery

 

A stunning contribution, and a gift of rare honey in rock hard times. McDonald combs through the ruins of empire, and environmental collapse with a punishing clarity to make something torn and new. Few thinkers have written so deftly of whiteness from within, and McDonald’s keen ear for the rites of black joy is a testimony to what a politics of love might sound like. This poetry dances us into revolution.

—Tsitsi Jaji, author of Beating the Graves and Africa in Stereo

You can buy this book and other SHP chapbooks in our bookstore.

Colony Collapse Syndrome  

as we squat through slum
rise slum set
in this labor hood of Atlantis
I wonder how much sun one needs
to see to say she’s seen it set
this life in the house of bees
a simple stock fortified by light
oblique as it ends it seems
she gathers strength in fading
don’t just expect to die
she sighs but
know that you’ll also be
forgotten
these are the stories the dead
tell themselves
one night in exile
she made small circles
with her heels in the bed sheet
like a finger over crystal lips
she swirled until a slow-found
center coalesced into a sugar storm
flowed over our hovel
at the top of the stairs
so much unwaged
labor boiled
off into the wallpaper
she said
it’s true it smelled
of boxes in there
soft power and echo chamber music
the semiotics of assault rifles
our shoulders dry rubbed
with anesthetic saltrash
and technocrats
now this poorly lit paradise
a Molotov wick soaking
in the oily abyss
so many small engines after dark
charge hard between herbicide lines in
febrile fight or flight
it seems this coast is the same
latitude as my dreams
dukkha music
growing
eroding
I’m tired for tomorrow

—from Milksop Codicil, SHP, February 2017; Originally published in Warscapes

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Finalists

 

The Editors and The Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee congratulate the 2016 Finalists for their fine work:

 

My Coney Island by Susan Oringel

 

My Milosz Dream

 

…how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will —Czeslaw Milosz 

She left—the former owner—but left
junk cars and lumber on the lawn,
ball gowns and dishes dispersed
and the woodstove with incense burning.

The doors swung open to all her friends—
they didn’t need keys
and came to chat about the good old days.

She even left a daughter, my old self,
a surly girl who whined each time I tried
to make it my own home. And I whined back,
I bought this place, but everyone
told me gravely, I was wrong.

A country house on a hill, acreage,
intended escape, but this was a way station
for neighbors; a tiny urban ghetto nestled close,
armies of boys wheeled around on bikes,
men in fatigues with guns darted through streets:
shouts, sounds of breaking glass.

Safe, safe, I muttered, shooing neighbors out.
I rammed an old oak table against the kitchen door,
piled up wooden chairs. Then ran and shoved the sofa
behind the front, a bureau stuffed with keepsakes
in front of that. By sunset I’d hammered shut
all the windows, when I heard the knock.

An elderly voice, accented and gentle,
asked me to let him in. I sat transfixed;
he found the one door I’d forgot. Entered
in a long gray coat, kissed my forehead, and said,
Yes, it’s difficult, those guests—still, it’s your house.

—NCTE English Journal

 

Time’s Window, Open by Karen Steinmetz

 

Marriage Songs

The huntress, our guiding spirit,
leads us to a meadow, bird-ful,
bounded. We are nimble with hope.
Do not torment her.
Morning finds me avid & fearful,
demon future balanced. Each trifle, windfall
or curse. Love’s ballast holds us almost steady,
vessel just dream stuff.
To a tiny, indigo Accidental,
palmed & banded, frailty is total, given,
awful. It can’t escape the hand enfolding,
winged though it is.
Acrimony, jealousy, spiteful riffing,
rued as soon as spoken, remembered ever.
Like the scorpion’s skitter, its bloodless caress—
numbing & fatal.
I could savage vows today, let me love you
even angry. I have true deeds to kinder
places. Threading rooms of
panderers—we two.
No less beautiful than Orion falling
down from heaven’s roost to the morning, husband,
is your homing, hunt ended, hearth-fires calling
you from the outlands.

—Still Against War V: Poems for Marie Ponsot, Published by Jamie Stern and Nan Lombardi, 2015.

 

Orange, Dreaming by K. T. Landon  

 

An Andalusian Dog

 

Once is enough for Buñuel’s Chien,
because even if you know now it was a dead calf
or a dead pig or a dead donkey,
at the time you thought it was an old, blind dog
and now the truth and the belief exist side by side,
just as your nineteen-year-old self, weeping for that dog,
still cries inside your fifty-year-old self,
pitying that foolish sophomore and, OK,
maybe never the same river twice but still,
always the same you, only more so.
Always the same little sister
in the red wool coat that matches yours,
your mother in her white uniform
laughing and talking in the tiny kitchen,
the same father home from work
with a package from the fish market that’s still moving.
The days are never wholly over,
and the losses pile up but you lean into them,
you think you’ve learned to take it. You’re fifty—
get over it—and still nineteen and still five,
and your little sister wakes up from a dream
screaming that the lobsters are in her bed,
and your mother is trying to show her there are no lobsters
and your father is yelling (your father is always yelling)
and you and your sister are both crying and you have no clue
that it will be you who tells the hospital yes,
take her corneas, and they will slice them from her eyes.
You won’t be there but you can imagine it,
and though you know she won’t feel it—
it wasn’t the actress, after all, or even the dog—
still you cry, and you are fifty and your sister is dead,
and you are nineteen and bawling in French 103,
and you are five and there are no lobsters
and your sister is right there
beside you in the room you share,
whispering to you in the dark.

—winner, 2013 Arts and Letters PRIME Poetry Prize

 

Childbed Fever by Kelly Rowe

 

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Slapering Hol Press is also pleased to announce

the 2015 reprint of The Scottish Café, by Susana H.Case, first published in 2002.

Nobel Prize-winning chemist from Cornell University, poet Roald Hoffmann says of the chapbook,

 

The Scottish Café is a wonderful evocation of a special place, a time, and the interactions of mathematicians. The premonitions of doom weigh on this wonderful gathering, as they should. It’s excellent poetry!

 

Poet, editor, and critic, Paul Zimmer in the Georgia Review adds,

 

it is the kind of necessary, cautionary tale of a life once lived, but lost under overwhelming conditions that our heedless, instant-media age needs to be told.