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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2005 : Deborah DeNicola
INSPECTION
after the painting of the contemporary Russian artist, Maxim Kantor
Believe, if you will, that he isn't guilty.
But brighten the bare bulb a little at each denial.
The tile will glare, his tonsils burning
like the screams he chokes down to keep us off him.
When he's drunk on the sheer volume of our voices,
the quiet is such you can hear the dogs shitting in the dust.
When the yellow walls wave like some crazy oasis,
remember we'll lose our features, and faceless,
we'll drift from the center of these acts.
We're only instruments following orders.
In just a few hours after dinner and brandy with our wives,
this cell will be silent as angels, a space we never entered.
And later tonight when you cup your mistress's buttocks
in your fingers, you'll forget the stare in his rheumy eyes.
But for now, consider his filth, the animal quality of his moans.
His muscles are slack, hair falling out, his jaw can't hold
the phlegm in his mouth. One toe beneath your boot will crush
like a clove of garlic. Other men will be worse,
there will always be those that whisper of rats
and experiments, those who spread rumors
of transports to pits, those who tell jokes-always the jokes.
After a month you'll look back on your qualms and laugh
at yourself. Remember you're young and torture gets old
like everything else.
This poem was a finalist in the 2005 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Ms. DeNicola was also a finalist in the 2004 War Poetry Contest for her poem "The Kiss". Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Deborah DeNicola
Deborah DeNicola edited the anthology Orpheus & Company:
Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology, published in 1999 from The University Press of New England. She was awarded a Poetry Fellowship in 1997 from the National
Endowment for the Arts, received The
William T. Foley Award in 2000 from America, the Barbara
Bradley Award in 1996 from the New
England Poetry Club, and a Special Mention from the Pushcart
Prizes 1992. She is the author of Where
Divinity Begins (Alice James Press, 1994) and two chapbooks, Psyche Revisited (1992), which won the Embers Magazine Chapbook Contest, and Rainmakers (Coyote Love Press, 1984). She does dreamwork and poetry mentoring from her website, www.intuitivegateways.com.
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