2020 PRIME NUMBER MAGAZINE AWARD FOR POETRY
Judge for Poetry: Adrian Rice
Originally from Belfast, Ireland, and now living with his family in Hickory, North Carolina, Adrian Rice has established himself as a poet on both sides of the Atlantic. Muck Island is housed in The Tate Gallery and The Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Mason’s Tongue was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Literary Prize, and nominated for the Irish Times Prize for Poetry. He has published three collection of poems with Press 53: The Clock Flower; Hickory Station; and The Strange Estate: New & Selected Poems 1986-2017. A poem from Hickory Station (“Breath”) was a (London) Guardian “Poem of the Week.” He is a Lecturer in First Year Seminar at Appalachian State University, where he is also working on his doctoral dissertation, “Education in Poetry: Learning through Poems.”
First Prize in Poetry
“Crazy Eights” by Aaron Fischer of Fort Lee, NJ
Runners-Up
“White Sands” by John Blair of San Marcos TX
“The Farthest Side” by Diane Thiel of Albuquerque, NM
And Congratulations to Our Finalists
“When You Can’t” by Anne Harding Woodworth of Washington, DC
“In Hospice” by Donald Levering of Santa Fe, NM
“That Hound” by Teena Shields of Powell Butte, OR
Aaron Fischer
Winner for Poetry ($1,000)
“Crazy Eights” (Pushcart Prize nominee)
$1,000 First Prize
Followed by Author Bio and Judge’s Comment
Crazy Eights
That’s what my father called them, the blackfish
we caught on the troll, or tried to, because they’d drive you crazy,
three quick hits on the line—bap, bap, bap—and they’d strip
the bait off the hook. The last long days
of late summer, the chum’s eddy and iridescent slick
on the water. My father was getting on
with the business of dying: one careful Schlitz
nursed through the afternoon, each rationed Winston
raising a shuddering cough. It was a relief to know nothing
would ever be right or resolved between us.
That left the purity of small talk. Anchor or drift?
Bloodworms or fiddlers? A buck on the first fish.
From the air you’d have seen two men sitting in a skiff,
following the shallow, forked channels among the tidal islands.
~ ~ ~
Judge’s comment: “Crazy Eights” is a quietly beautiful but also hard-edged poem. Set within a two-man skiff floating along the watery roads between tidal islands, the poet employs the memory of a fishing trip as a perfect analogy for familial relationships—sometimes they’re successful, sometimes not, but you keep going back, keep on casting in hopeful love, with each fish landed somehow sufficing for the many that are lost. The poem wears its formal coat lightly, fittingly, it’s fourteen-line free sonnet-ness a perfect covering for an elegiac poem dealing with the age-old, often tangled, relationship between a father and a son. I loved this expertly balanced poem, with honest hints of family enmity subtly counterpointed with family feeling; and while “the purity of small talk” may not be a bumper haul, it is, thankfully, still enough for this father and son to share.
~ ~ ~
Aaron Fischer worked for 30-plus years as a rewrite editor in print and online. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Briar Cliff Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Five Points, Hamilton Stone Review, Hudson Review, Sow’s Ear, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Black Stars of Blood: The Weegee Poems, was published this past summer. He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes as well as for Best New Poets 2018. “Aubade for LR” was named best sonnet of the year by the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest in 2018.
John Blair
Runner-Up 2020 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry
“White Sands”
Followed by Author Bio and Judge’s Comment
White Sands
July 16th, 1945, 5:42AM Mountain War Time,
White Sands, New Mexico, thirteen minutes
after the world’s first atomic explosion
In first light, the glass is still falling
a molten mist a fog colored
the thin green of empty Coca-Cola
bottles the morning falling along with it
in narrow degrees green, too just
at the horizon’s edge where the landscape
snips it clean like an eyelid closing
and though no one’s close enough
to hear it (the nearest living human
is a technician unnamed & unknown
10,000 yards away at his station
ordered to keep his eyes closed his head
down inside a shelter made of concrete
and timber piled over with dirt who maybe
hears a kind of crackling in the moment
before he lifts his head from his arms
before he pulls his ear plugs out
a sound like frost under a boot ice
night-crusted on dead grass back in Lubbock
or Keokuk or in some calm
cold corner of Baltimore a hometown
sparking his lonely marrows
where wonder seethes
like seafoam like wrack thrown up
by a spring-tide busy with crabs and sea-lice
climbing eager through his liquids
a breaking surf to line his rocky strands
with the same soft bottle-green but it’s not
his story and he knows it and is not
unhappy to know it) there is
probably a sound but the light
that blazed before daylight red
through his arm’s flesh is already gone
photons screaming mindlessly
into space where light and time
are little more than white noise
a fry of abandonment like gypsum sand
blown up the stoss slopes of pure
white dunes blown over mountains
over cities radiant with compulsion
and terrible disregard to fall with a fine
exhausted susurration on houses on beds
and pillows and sleeping children who wake
to find it stony in the mitered corners
of their eyes strange as dread or love
or the hard pale light of some fading
and childish dream.
~ ~ ~
Judge’s comment: “White Sands” is an impressive piece of work, a serious response to a serious topic, the first “successful” test of an atomic device, a plutonium bomb set off at White Sands, New Mexico, in 1945, the precursor of the infamous mushroom clouds of one month later. Hard to be equal to the task of responding to such a momentous, preparatory event, but the poet succeeds well, marrying an appropriately fragmented form and haunting phrasing to capture the “terrible disregard” of humanity in lieu of the destruction of the “fading / and childish dream” of civilized progress.
~ ~ ~
John Blair has published six books, the most recent of which is Playful Song Called Beautiful (U. of Iowa Press, 2016), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and he has a seventh book, The Art of Forgetting, coming out from Measure Press in the fall of 2020.
Diane Thiel
Runner-Up 2020 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry
“The Farthest Side” (Pushcart Prize nominee)
Followed by Author Bio and Judge’s Comment
The Farthest Side
Some afternoons, in the small space of time
between my coming home from school
and his heading off to work, second shift, and maybe
some of third (what did I know of those austere days),
my father would have a question waiting for me.
We couldn’t usually find a way to get beyond
all the history that divided us, that kept us
far from each other, for such a small house.
But when I came home, he would sometimes
have the paper open to The Far Side,
usually one that went a bit further over the edge,
and would ask if I understood this one.
We had our dark favorites that were fairly clear.
The engorged snake stuck in the crib with the teddy bear.
The spider web at the bottom of the slide—
“If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.”
But the fact that he asked me, even back then,
about the more complicated ones, believing I would know
about natural selection, space, modern art or poetry
meant more to me than I would have admitted,
more than I even realized at the time.
When we talked about Cow Poetry, it went beyond
the cow’s damning the electric fence. The pilots wondering
what a mountain goat was doing in that cloud bank ahead
brought us to the moment outside the frame.
Maybe Larson intended that a few of these,
like the meat in the bowl on the window table,
or Cow Tools, with its unrecognizable objects,
would resist any quick interpretation
and just get people talking.
~ ~ ~
Judge’s comment: “The Farthest Side” is a strong poem that hints at the lifelong tensions between father and child, tensions overcome, briefly but so memorably, by, of all things, a shared regard for Gary Larson’s The Far Side. Discussing the comic strips, the poet says, helped them to “get beyond / all the history that divided” them, that kept them—literally and emotionally—“far from each other,” especially those “more complicated” strips that the father would enlist the poet’s help to understand, a telling acknowledgment of pride in his child’s education. I especially loved the ending of the poem, the idea that Larson’s art can complicate “any quick interpretation / and just get people talking”—the sine qua non for bridge building at home, and in the wider world.
~ ~ ~
Diane Thiel is the author of ten books of poetry and nonfiction. Her new book of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Thiel's work has appeared widely, including in Poetry and The Hudson Review, and is re-printed in numerous anthologies. Her awards include PEN, NEA and Fulbright Awards. Thiel is Professor and Associate Chair at the University of New Mexico. With her husband and four children, she has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. Learn more at www.dianethiel.net