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Contests : Wergle Flomp Free Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2008 : Lytton Bell
TEN USES FOR CABBAGE
- Stuff it in the crack beneath the bedroom door
It keeps the heat in and the noise out,
And is biodegradable
- A maiden sat upon a ten-foot cabbage
How much does a ten-foot cabbage weigh?
She wondered.
- There is mayonnaise. There are carrots.
Cabbage is the least of it.
- Sometimes, when I look in the mirror,
I see cabbage.
Driving by open fields, I pass cabbage
After cabbage, after cabbage.
I know that cabbage is all. Cabbage is everything.
- After eating cabbage, we recline by the fire.
Cabbage, warm in our bellies, compels us in silence
Toward one another, for the sake of leafy greens.
- There were times when, no matter what we ate,
It still tasted to us unaccountably of cabbage.
"But I made tofu," I said.
"But tofu doesn't taste like anything," you said.
And when I checked the steamer,
Sure enough, cabbage had infested the tofu.
Eventually, cabbage replaces all things.
- And when the tofu tasted only of tofu, I found
I missed the taste of cabbage.
Because I know it so intimately, am I destined
To take cabbage for granted?
Will I wake up one day and forget
All that it has meant to me,
Not just in this life, but in every life? No. Never.
- I met Jesus on the highway.
His eyes were full of cabbage.
Cabbage is not the be all and end all.
It is only the beginning.
- In the produce aisle, for a moment,
From the corner of your eye,
You thought you spied cabbage.
But when you turned,
You saw that it was only iceberg lettuce.
You were wrong.
Cabbage comes to us in many forms.
- Somewhere in the Everglades,
A butterfly lands upon the head of an alligator.
She thought he was just a log.
All this has to do with cabbage.
Sent as a joke to Poetry.com, this poem won an honorable mention in the 2008 Wergle Flomp humor poetry contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author Lytton Bell received a cash prize of $72.95.
About Lytton Bell
Lytton Bell has published two chapbooks (A Path Before Winter, 1998, and The Book of
Chaps, 2002), won four poetry contests (Sacramento Public Library, 2002, Tickled by
Thunder, 2003, Laughing Frank, 2003 and the Brodine/Brodinsky/Connecticut Poetry
Society, 2004) and performed at many local venues, including the Sacramento Poetry
Center, Luna's Café and The Book Collector, to name a few. Her work has appeared in
over two dozen poetry journals, web sites and e-zines. She lives in Sacramento,
California, with her cat Simon, husband (novelist David Gay), and their two uberchildren,
Sam and Charlotte. Ms. Bell earned a poetry scholarship to the Pennsylvania
Governor's School for the Arts in 1988, where she studied with Deb Burnham and Len
Roberts. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1993 and went
on to study poetry with the legendary Molly Fisk. Ms. Bell can be reached at
lytton_bell@hotmail.com.
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