EYE WEEKLY would like to congratulate the winners of our first annual poetry contest: Jakub Stachurski, Tammy Armstong, Matthew Tierney and Phillip Crymble. The contest was judged blindly by Damian Rogers, Emily Schultz and Bill Kennedy. Emily Schultz will read the winning poems at Best Practices: The Scream Alumni Night, which launches the 2008 Scream Literary Festival. Damian Rogers hosts. July 3, 8pm. Supermarket, 68 Augusta. For more information about the Scream Literary Festival, which runs to July 14 with daily events, readings, panels and parties, go to www.thescream.ca.

FIRST PRIZE

TURDUCKEN

By Jakub Stachurski

For my main squeeze:
a bouquet of turducken,
shining layers of skin and flesh
chicken, turkey and duck bound
with string. The duck’s flying,
the chicken’s searching the grass,
blindly, in short bursts of flight escaping
the farmer’s young boy attempting
to ride it like a horse. The turkey ambling
in grim contemplations, Aristotelian strut. Every
flying, searching and knowing
spine shapes the other two; stiff columns meld
in the oven, grow in curve with the other
U’s, the hulls of bottled ships, ribs
squeak like gaskets, squeal
like the jaws of life, learn the necessary shapes
of accidental flight, search and think:
evolution in 45 minutes at 375 degrees
fahrenheit, how quickly the line is rendered
pliable as concrete reinforcements of a bridge
swaying in a strong wind. Amnesia of the bones,
unlearn the previous motions in this heat,
come to know new shapes of the sky, the earth
and those unseen bird things, necessary alterations
when one is placed inside the other
and the unknown flesh is shelter.
A handful of fowl, a flowering
glistening dark skin, flesh soft as petals
peeled open. A freshly broiled
bouquet of chicken, turkey, and duck
bound with string. I offer you
a meal’s worth and some leftovers.
I offer you fullness.

Jakub Stachurski is studying Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. His work has appeared in Soliloquies, Headlight and, as a teenage intern many years ago, EYE WEEKLY. His reviews appear regularly in Matrix Magazine. He splits his time between Toronto and Montreal, where he lives with his partner, who inspires original bouquets.


SECOND PRIZE (TIE)

RIVER SCOUT

By Tammy Armstrong


“Even the dogs in West Kerry know that the ‘otherworld’ exists, and that to be in and out of it constantly is the most natural thing in the world.”
                                                                    — Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

Even the dogs here
fetch down the narrows between worlds.
Mine, asleep at the hearth, whimpers a river-sluice —
psychopomp to the fray of the passing.

He croups a threnody
out there for the ones who crossed the years
and I wait for his spade-headed insistence:
scratched ears, stroked scruff.

Mucking at the river’s littoral,
they beckon and coo him passage
across that alligator pear dark current,
shallow enough to touch bottom
until the middle —
riffled with hijacked spirit.

He twitches a hind leg
as though to shake off the damp,
then runs a meadow thought —
these daily visitations
when the woodstove’s range burns red
and he dreams hot-pelted.

Through the river smalt,
silted where the path slides fast
into mushrooms and dark-seeded fruit,
he goes.
But what of the time?
Mere minutes here
but there enough to return over-heated
near the oak-fed flames,
his heartbeat booted with kettle-tick messages —
arrhythmic meaning.

Nothing to me as he roves conscious
and I let him out to the yard,
the sun, the snow
he’s pathed into a sort of sense, a liturgy
sometimes trilled,
sometimes waited out.


Tammy Armstrong’s writing has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, US, Europe, UK and Algeria. She has a BFA and MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.  Her first novel, Translations: Aistreann won the David Adams Richards Award (1999). Her first collection of poetry, Bogman’s Music, won the WFNB Alfred G. Bailey Award (2000) and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award (2002). Her second poetry collection, Unravel, was published Spring 2004 and was short-listed for a ReLit Award. Her third collection of poetry, Take Us Quietly, was recently released with Gooselane Editions; an excerpt was short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards. She currently lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.


SECOND PRIZE (TIE)

ALASKAN BLACK COD AT THE ST. LAWRENCE MARKET

By Matthew Tierney

No formula forbids time, t, from wending
backwards. Cod swim forward, that’s all
they know. The fishmonger’s blade proceeds
to unzip its coat; two fillets flipped open, mid-book.
From a distance, d, the ribs look like lined sheets
awaiting words. To this mind. But like
doesn’t change what’s white and meat. Flesh
is kinship, I’m told, though my pretensions
go beyond polypeptides. The universe spins
only one way: clockwise. Access to history gives me
a leg up, visions of primeval muck, slick and nitrous,
ancestral pools hissing through rock; conjures too
queasiness about the makeup of my food, now
portioned and on the scale, a giant’s tooth, mass, m,
over a kilogram. Dinner for two, the man’s smile
a scratched lotto card. And the tale of the cod?
A few calories and I’m able to picture that veterbraed  
creature at Ocean’s brim. Nature has one timetable,
one through force, f, and I’ll take my share as if
I had a choice. That’ll have to do for the fish.


Matthew Tierney is the author of one book of poetry, Full Speed through the Morning Dark, with a second forthcoming from Coach House Books in Spring 2009. He won the K.M. Hunter Award for Literature in 2006. Poems of his have appeared recently in maisonneuve, Arc and online at Jacket, as well as the anthology I.V. Lounge Nights.


THIRD PRIZE

BLACK ACES

By Phillip Crymble


Whole potatoes packed in water, diced
and hissing in the pan — instant coffee,
and our last beefsteak tomato cut in slabs.

Dead cans of Molson’s on the table
in the morning light, the flickering black
and white TV. Back then Olympic hockey

teams were made of men the bigger clubs
released — black aces, troubled veterans.
The night before we’d had a few, then fired

up the sled — our breath as thick as nickel
stack emissions.  Hard to understand
such cold.  The two-stroke wound out

full — a blur of paper birch and poplar.  
Just a phantom moon. The lake a polished
sheet of ice. Our travellers frozen through.

The trail head miles behind us. Whiskers
stiff as cord grass, fingers turning blue —
the medal game unfolding in our minds.

                           — for Robert Daniel

Phillip Crymble was born in Northern Ireland and emigrated to Canada with his family as a child.  In 2002 he earned his MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, receiving the top Hopwood Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many fine publications worldwide, including Poetry Ireland Review, The New York Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review and The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Poetry from Canada & Ireland. In 2007 he participated in Poetry Ireland's annual Introductions reading series in Dublin. Wide Boy, his first short collection, was recently released by Lapwing, Belfast.