Thank you to our guest judges Lisa Marie Basile (Caper Journal), Bryan Borland (Assaracus), Jessie Carty (Referential Magazine), and Brad Nelson (Eclectic Flash) for their tireless work in reading and ranking the 116 entries in the contest. They are the best and you should check out their publications! Much appreciation and admiration to all the writers who entered and congratulations to the winners who faced fierce competition.
First-Ever vox poetica Poetry Contest! Today’s Words 7th Runner-up:
Delete, Deleting, Deleted
By Jekwu Anyaegbuna
The rhythm of distance flew inwards,
and she saw many distances melding
onto one another like the pages of
an enormous medical textbook, pages
explaining the blood of oxygen burning
like a fire in cooking life to a stop from
cover to cover, pages of little tools that
engineer an existence. They both had been
together, he and she, paged and stapled
and bound to be read and examined together.
The male page. The female page. Before he
was deleted, he had been deleting diabetes
(Diabolic beetles of the pancreas), cultivating
ponds of sweet urine that ants loved to feast
upon. He fed the ants with his frequent export
of this hot tea, delicious to ants, delirious to him,
the streets of distance, the goggled eyes of this
blind destiny opening her towards the window
of widowhood, her passport to a distant isolation.
Would she delete herself too, to close some distant
eternities? She would read only a page per day, only
her own page, a page, a page. She would
never finish a page! He was more than a page.
This poem evokes a sense of the surprising impermanence of one’s existence.
Jekwu Anyaegbuna’s poem Rainy Nights appeared at vox poetica in March.
I found this flowed well, as I sat with a cup of hot tea and honey.