The Enigmatist
c/o Mike Gullickson
P.O. Box 1455
Burnet, TX 78611-7455

Learning About Injustice
by Patty Wixon
                                       "..in anxious air"
                                                    Li-Young Lee

Two new students arrive midday, midweek, mid-school year.
I ask their names, feel their suspicions, their certainty
that nothing good waits here, in this school, in this office
with bright lights aimed at uncovering family secrets.

Today these brothers will hunker by the wall waiting to be forced
into another risk. They pull their jackets close, layers against
anxious air hard to inhale. Like their dad used to tell them,
in school you can't always get your breath.

They'll move slowly down the hall memorizing classrooms
smelling of cedar shavings in cages for pet rats with bead-black
eyes like those chewing around their house. They can hear
recess shouts out there where kids are more invisible.

Now they pass yesterday's new kids, the ones with eyes too old,
who sat silently in the office as their mother retold the tale
of the month they hovered in a closet counting American bombs,
dreading being discovered, dreading not being discovered.

Grayson Books
P.O. Box 270549
West Hartford, CT 06127-0549

Every American Child
by Paul Hostovsky

will be issued a blues harmonica at birth
and taught to bend the notes because the notes
are for bending. And no American child
will lock his harmonica up in a harmonica case
but will keep it in his pocket all his life
so that any lost, scattered, fallen, foreign thing,
be it lint, pollen, tobacco, sleet or spiders,
may enter through the holes and take up
residence there. And every American child
will know how to inspect his blues harmonica
without assistance or prompts, unscrewing the tiny
bolts with his own fingernail, and without losing
them or the even tinier serrated square nuts,
remove the metal flanges and test each delicate
reed by plucking it with the same fingernail
to see if it rings true. And every American
child will be required to carry his blues harmonica
with him on his person at all times, and to produce
his blues harmonica when asked for identification
with the blues. And every American child will
be expected to learn by heart the history of the blues
because the history of the blues is an American
story, which some American grownups can't be trusted
to tell, much less sing, to their American children.

• Prizes in the Open Category: $750, $300, $100
• Prizes in the Student Category: $500, $200, $75
• No entry fee required
• First-place essays will appear in Oregon Quarterly
• A selection of top essays will be featured in a springtime public reading on the UO campus
• Fifteen finalists (ten in the open category and five students) will be announced in the Summer 2009 issue of Oregon Quarterly
• All finalists will be invited to participate in a writing workshop with the contest judge on the day of the reading

Dowry - for Joan & Danny
by Thomas O'Grady

Some still prefer to use dot (rhymes with got)
a loanword from the French dot (rhymes with go)
when referring to what a bride once brought
to a new union; not just her trousseau

two settings of fine china, a hope chest
stuffed with cross-stitched linens but real chattel:
four fertile fields, turf-rights to the best
half-rood of bog, a few head of cattle....

At worst, the dot might seal a legal pact,
add final punctuation as an end
in itself: a match made matter-of-fact,
a deal approved on grounds of make-pretend.

Sometimes, though, it paved way for the future.
Take that woman from slab-rich Liscannor:
her wedding day a point of departure,
she founded marriage on a flagstone floor.

                                                    Limerick, July 1998

• First Prize: US$1,500
• Second Prize: US$500
• Third Prize: US$350
• Honorable Mentions (4): US$100 each
• Special Prize for Best Rhyming Poem: US$150
• Special Prize for Best Traditional Rhyming Poem: US$100

The Crossroads
by Anna Smalley

He suddenly recalled Sonia's words, "Go to the cross-roads, bow down to the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it too, and say aloud to the whole world, 'I am a murderer.'" —Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Let us go then, you and I,
Let us dance
Down this path of red brick,
In this rain, warm and coppery,
From a sky that is bleeding clean.
You and I, we are clay
Staining in this slick shower
Of liquid that rusts before it even lands.

You say
I know that nothing good lives in me.
I say I press on to take hold of that.
You say
For I have the desire but cannot carry it out.
And I say nothing.

And we go, you and I,
But we hesitate;
Crossing no Roman roads or bridges.
This warm rain, bitter and thick,
Dyes with the sharp color of crimson.
You and I, we are clay
Rejecting the live lacquer
Coming over our earthen vessels.

I say
I have the desire to do what is good.
You say But I cannot carry it out.
I say
Not that I have already obtained all this.
You say Nothing...

[click to read the complete poem]

Rage
by Jennifer Barber

drew us to its
ramped-up heart
where we faced

each other, spitting nails,
I hate you,
oh, fuck you,

getting into it
like wolves inside
the skin of lambs

or demons
frothing
in a herd of swine,

maddened, swiveling
their terrifying
half-blind heads—

times I wished
I were dead
for an hour or two

and you gone
long enough
to stop shaking—

until the stung walls
and farther off,
the ringing stars

leached the poison out,
turning my blood
over like spring dirt.

Mold
by Elisabeth Murawski

I have no choice
but to drink the hot wax.
I am a serving girl

subject to the whim
(will, wish)
of the master. Filled

to capacity,
I am set aside
to cool, bearing

this column
of incipient light
within

until it is taken
from me, carefully
pried, child

of the narrow
mother,
and once again

I am alone, sounding
the depths
of my previous life,

empty and dark
with messianic
longing.