This year’s Foley poetry contest

I’ll return for one night, carrying youpapaya. Thickly cut. Resembling driftwood scattered below the parking lotI can see from Sacramento’s river bridges. I’m taking I-5 south to 99. Cut tomatoskins roll in foil. My chest drops like ocean swells I could onlysee once

“I am rebegot/ Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.” — John Donne, “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day” Again and again, from nothingness I’m born.Each death I witness makes me more my own.I imagine each excess line of mine erased,each muscle

The lady of the cleanersdoesn’t care.She really doesn’t care.She writes your fatein a steamed infernoand presses with despair.Three pins in mouth—Judas, Cassius, Brutus,—she greets you lowand points with tail,like Cerberus,to where the stainedand spotted go.“Come again,

Their shadows flickered and stretched to the west.The future fixed its lidless eyeOn concrete switchgrass, furrows of asphalt.Telescopes, searchlights aimed on highShot the flare of the mind at darkness.We stood on the moon but failed to scryThe star called wormwood. The signal changed, but the

O Holy Spiritwe did not knowhow strong you arein our dull ageuntil we saw your colorsapple reds, transparent greens,blue of truth,laid upon the figurinesdeep embossed in halos,Gospel figures,hooded, cloaked,upon the roador standing by a city doorwaydrawn in heavy blackened brushagainst the Holy skie