Second Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Essay Award. The ground comfortable as any bed. A whistle of grass between your teeth. The green blanket tickling and sticking to your sunburned arms, your thighs, the fleshy backs of your hands where they cross beneath your head. A rabbit! An elephant . . . now a truck. There: a whale! The wind swells high overhead in the trees. You recline with all the world above you, all before you, fluid and beautiful and endless. You are six[...]
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When my mother died the nurse came running. I heard her feet, muffled and far, thudding down the carpeted corridor. A hospice is no place for running; no one is there to be saved, there are no emergencies. If someone dies it is not a failure. They have fulfilled their part of the bargain. But [...]
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Mrs. Ruzicka’s seat in an orchestra box to the far right of the concert hall allows her to look directly into the face of the concertmaster. She thought she had fallen in love with him during Dvorak’s Symphony No. 6 in D, but now that the orchestra has begun Dvorak’s Serenade for strings, she is sure of it. The grace of his bow splits her chest like a surgeon’s knife[...]
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From his usual spot at the counter, Carter Bingham followed the waitress as she made coffee, first shaking the contents of a metallic pouch to one end, then ripping it open with the bright colored talons of her fingernails. Lime green today, a color that reminded him of antifreeze.
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Be sweet, my soul,
be soft, my soul
go round the bend gently, gently[...]
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Third Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
I have a who singing silently to your who singing
silently to my who, whoever and whomever
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Second Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Poetry Award. At twelve, I could only see the seventeen-year-old boy
as a gift. A fluke from God [...]
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First Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Poetry Award
I did that, and it didn’t go as expected.
For one, I’m not the person in the poem,
though I share certain affinities with her[...]
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First Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Poetry Award. We have sought here to wrestle with the polished burl bowl of the author’s mind — its baroque excesses, its stark and stained language — as if taking on Grendel in the dark woods of indeterminacy…
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Second Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Poetry Award. It’s that scene in the thriller where the woman walks alone down
the rain-flashed city street in teetering, come-kill-me stilettos —
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