Joy Yourcenar - First Prize

Handwalking

The nut-laced smell of loam pervades the root cellar;
here, the air is cool, damp, redolent with the scents
of herb bunches hanging on the highest beams.
Miscreant, we pull the whitewashed door closed
from the inside and lie on the chill, dirt floor,
trace our initials in the swept clay, talk in feral whispers.
We are hiding among the bushel baskets of cabbages
and hulking winter squash, tucked behind barrels
brimming with red potatoes and purple onions.
She will not find us here behind the neatly labeled rows
of Ball jars filled with tomatoes, fiddlehead and flat green beans.
She thinks I fear the dark and small places more than her.
We use the time to watch a black and yellow spider
repair her web, to plot impossible escapes to distant lands.
We are hiding from the graphic accusation
of two muddy footprints defiling her virgin white couch,
the pristine carpet we are not allowed to set foot upon.
We are hiding from a dare flung down, my sister's gauntlet
taunting me to cross ten feet of pale temptation,
picked up, only to be dropped again when, handwalking,
gravity betrayed me, barely leaning. I slipped
from line to slope to arc, the slight tilt
touching my silt glazed sneakers to my embossed velvet doom.

She will not care I almost made it.

Joy Yourcenar writes: I am a poet, expatriate and freelance technical editor lucky enough to live and write in Halifax, Nova Scotia with my life partner, the photographer Eric Boutilier-Brown, and my daughter, Zöe-Genevieve, future empress of the known world. I have two personal websites: Mythologies (my own site) and icon/graphy (a collaborative visual poetry site with Eric). I have been published on-line in Gravity, The Astrophysicist Tango Partner Speaks, Avalon and The Initiative and off-line in The Maine Review, The Stolen Island Review, and Silhouettes in the Electric Sky. The best way to get to know me is through my poetry.