Third Place

Susan Elbe

Madison, WI

Susan Elbe is the author of a chapbook, Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press), and a full-length poetry collection, Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press). Her poems appear in many journals, including Blackbird, MARGIE, and North American Review. Among her awards are the 7^th Annual Oneiros Press Broadside Contest, the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award, the CALYX Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, and a Rowland Foundation Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center. She was born and raised in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood and remains a Chicagoan at heart. Her web site is www.susanelbe.com.

E. Ethelbert Miller’s comments:

“I was impressed by the overall range and styles I found in this application. A solid collection of work. In the middle of judging, I wanted to see an entire manuscript. The writer loves baseball and these poems touch all the bases.”

Susan Elbe

Putting Love in Its Place

This is how we lay down love,

in the chain-smoking dark

a glow that eats itself to ask.

This is where we lay it down,

underneath,

where what we lose, finds us.

Once we were an all-night city,

the moon-skinned clouds

the mole-blind river.

We stepped into the water

and became the boat,

a shimmer in the upside-down.

On a park bench, we forgot

our lives and let them

come to us, wind-smacked,

crumpled, the cheap ink

of romance staining us,

a mystery of misinformation.

This is why we lay down love,

because all there is is

wreckage that we keep

returning to, a dim-lamped room

of memory, its flimsy curtains

blowing summer in,

large between us, the unrumpled bed,

a hard pine in our throats.

This is how we lay down, love,

in the slattern, kissing dark,

in the unmasked part,

in the kicking-can emptiness

of the unasked-for heart.