First Prize
Joanna Boulter

Still Life With Figs

An untidy package, all its granular guts
stuffed into a sort of beanbag. Skin
contains the seeds, holds them bottom-heavy
bellying to a slight sideways droop
from offcentre nipples. Faint vertical veins
do not succeed in corseting their shape,
their generous opulence. And the colour!
they are plush, dull purple. Washed,
a faint grey bloom vanishes, returns with dryness.
I get a knife, halve one, am shocked
by brightness — scarlet seeds in scarlet flesh,
and the rind between them and the skin
(that smoky plum-colour) is a wholly surprising
pale greenish cream, the sort of colour
that looks smooth to the touch. It is.
But a quartered fig has nothing to hold its shape,
no inner membrane, no tension
nipple to base. That point of skin,
released, lifts, and the tiny seeds begin to fall,
a few at a time, bright on the white plate.
And suddenly I’m thinking
of my own sliced skin, my own severed
breast, fallen away into a dish.

Second Prize
Simon Rees-Roberts

When I was God

Nobody bothered to get on or off when the ‘Sir Nigel Gresley’ stopped at the station.
The train sparked away to nowhere particular, smelling of ozone, then came back again.
There weren’t many people about. Mrs. Penis spent most of the time just smiling and waiting
on platform 2 at Newtown Station. She was red and stood on a block of green plastic.
Mr. Bottom and family were never recovered after I’d blasted them into orbit.
Miss Piss had never been that co-operative. As punishment, I melted her head.
There were some grandparents, warty and leaden. I made them stand across the live rails.
Sometimes I’d turn the volts up to maximum, derailment, carriage slewed into the station
and Mrs. Penis would be dead again, still on her block and smiling as usual.
The ambulance waited for days at the crossing and when it moved off it crashed in a siding.
Afternoons were really quite boring, so often I did some bombing or strafing.
After engine trouble, I’d make a forced landing in one of the fields. There were some sheep
who mostly got caught up in the propellers, spraying the place with blood and their spleens.
There was always a lack of housing in Newtown, but please pronounce it Newton (like Isaac)
because once an apple fell down like an asteroid, screaming and spitting, demolished the chapel:
the congregation of the invisible, all dead in a fistful of cardboard and balsa.
Then for years nothing happened in Newtown. People got duller, dust kept on settling.
And come Armageddon … it wasn’t that wonderful: two bin liners left out for the dustman.

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Third Prize
Sarah Salway

Different Lives

My daughter’s trying on different lives
for size. She tries to catch me out,

snakes her arms around my neck,
pushes herself back into my lap.

Tell me about my real dad, she asks.
This is a game we’ve played before.

I close my eyes. He smells of home,
of ginger biscuits dipped in warm milk,

you know how you sip it to send you to sleep.
Sweet dreams he always said when he kissed me

goodnight. Once we stood under a street light
and he wrapped me in his coat,

buttoned it round the two of us. Sleep tight
I’d tell him. My daughter nods, her head heavy

on my chest, she murmurs an echo of my words
sleep tight, sweet dreams. I watch her go

as her father lifts her off my lap, cradles
her up to bed and I hear her sleepy plea

Tell me about my real mum. Alone, I strain
to catch his words, just out of reach.

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Commendation
Marlo Bester-Sproul

Bees

We knew it was the season
when the clover began congregating,
dividing the neighbors’ lots between kempt and un-kempt.

When the sun sat on our crowns and seared our vision
and our only relief was cool lawn —
but it was filled with their drone

and their hungry clamoring for more.
So, armed with jars and sticks, we would separate them,
and once they’d been culled and covered

we would sit above them like Gods,
watch their thin-legged scrabble
the bow of their heads

and through the thick glass — realization dawn.
Slowly, one-by-one
their rise and fall against invisible walls, their knocking.

We knew their language of dances,
we knew entire meadows were mapped in the corner of their minds,
and we knew they could follow you for miles.

But we would crouch in the heat and listen
to the din expanding like a drum —
how it travelled to others

elsewhere in hives who were listening and dancing.
They were bigger and stronger and could kill.
Rising like tornadoes they were crossing state lines

and we were running, sticks thrown aside,
jars toppling like cities.

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Commendation
Alice Kavounas

Flags

We walked south on 6th, against the traffic,
toward a column of sky, brand new, blank and blue —
a vacuum — funnelling us toward ground zero.

We stopped at the lights — a well-dressed woman
throwing up into a wire bin — the lights changed.

The next day I would go to an exhibition,
see Gauguin’s woodcut, Mahna no Varva Ino —
Day of the Evil Spirit — and think back
to that woman punctuating our journey

toward what will always be ground zero,
a coda to these unremarkable streets
where my mother filed away her final years;
and where (all those decades ago) father earned our keep
travelling here by subway, in starched white shirt,
suit and tie, braving the drenching summer heat.

The makeshift kiosks were busy selling tat —
baseball-style FDNY hats; postcards
of then and now, framed photos of destruction,
mementos for tourists to take back home.

Or, as I began to see, homely items
to pin to the railings that ring the cemetery
opposite. There, opposite: the infamous plot,
vast enough to have housed a civilisation.

We joined the slowly moving carousel of people
and walked silently round the world of loss ...

What could I leave here — a sandal, a ring?

I saw children’s indigo handprints
on a giant canvas; the hieroglyphs
of a thousand signatures; news clippings
honouring a son or daughter — the ink
already fading — heroes and heroines
in their hometown papers; banners from schools;
a love letter to a lost husband. And,

like the pilgrims who offered up ragged bits of clothing
at ancient wells for St Audrey to heal their ills,
people in their thousands had draped their T-shirts —
torn and rain-soaked, flapping in the hot, hot wind.
Flags, flags, flags.

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Commendation
Jane Monson

The Sandman

Jim was his name, a bright chase of red hair fidgeting around his eyes
and over his shoulders.
Most of his features were awkward
as though he’d fallen and let too many people put him together again
but his eyes were proud, clear and changing;
the colours catching you out to where he was;
one minute the skin of lime, the next the fruit.

He watched and listened carefully to the children as they repeated their mother’s words:
there was no television
so they would have to makes up games and read.

Jim quickly adapted to playing,
made sure to include both the boy and the girl equally in the games,
laughing and clapping as the boy leapt over chairs
arms outstretched, in flight across the living room floor in his Superman pyjamas,
teasing the girl as she begged her brother to calm down and be quiet.

Unfolding her knees and arms from her chest,
the girl got up from her chair, and said she had a game
or a trick she wanted to show.

She had mastered this act alone,
but in front of them she kept making mistakes and falling down,
so Jim made her practise —
head on a cushion on the floor by the wall, palms flat on the carpet
either side of her reddening cheeks,
she would kick her legs in the air and he would seize her ankles.

The back of her calves against the wall,
her feet nearly touching the shelves above, he would let go, clap and watch.

When she had perfected the wall
he set a cushion in the centre of the room,
placed her there like a vase
and moved his hands gently away from her legs,
fingers outstretched, tiptoeing backwards through the air,
a green eye on the delicate line cast from her toes to the ceiling,
the skin glowing from the hanging light,
the nightdress gathered about her neck and face
in still white folds over her eyes and bated breath.

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Commendation
Lesley Perrins

Empire State Building

The crowd bubbles out of the lift, a breaking wave
dispersing to the corners of the deck
like foam across a beach already wet.
All day the eager rise in dim cars, siphoned
through successive shafts. They stand shoulder
to shoulder and watch a sliding light count off
the silent litany of floors; till they're poured
out to chillier air and a sun that seems
more scintillant than in the cluttered streets.

We too have stood in line for the ascent,
have shuttled to that dazzling pinnacle
where distances seem silvered, as a mirror
blocks and catches, then reflects the light.
We look down where the pillared city glints
like satin aluminium in the haze;
it could stand polishing, perhaps be scoured,
but the bright sequestered square of Central Park
has colour you might rub off with your thumb.

A butterfly sits dark against the painted
guardrail, settled in to rest. We feel
it is heroic to have reached such heights.
Its wings keep hingeing open, flashing eyes
evolved, without awareness, to deceive.
Once, the builders of this tower would sit
on some suspended girder, eating lunch,
and read a broadsheet quite as casually
as factory hands along a park bench.

We join the crowd that's ebbing back and down
to channel through the narrows of the shop,
collecting postcards, plastic towers and gum.
The butterfly remains, close-folded like
an autumn leaf. Only after weeks we
learn it's not alone, but one of a great
and windworn company, which on the slow
hot exhalation from the streets, falls upward
through this inverse world and can't return.

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