these are the five - good luck everyone

The Making of Eve
by Lorna Dee Cervantes

"Unlike things yoke together"
~Coleridge

Summer was frying an egg
on the head of God. The Seven
Sisters were aghast at the lapse
of efficiency. The range
of emotions was complex:
God recalled The Mother
gently nuzzling his hair. The basin
filled with the sound of castanets
& the cascabels of snake tails. Winter
was beside herself, every crotch
or crutch expired—the falling
was collecting. Summer crawled
out from the hand of Earth, took
the top-hat out from the rabbit,
and took The Fall for it. Eggs
burst at their seemliness, seedy
viaducts of passionfruit juice
flowed into a red sea. Winter got her
period, and gave birth to Spring
who wanted amnesty—the country
carved out of breath expired, centuries
passed out in the confusion. History,
like a second smoke, snaked around
The Garden. And God, amid the figs
and rapture, was so tight
a Script Institute herpitologist
couldn't milk him. Picture
a moment in Paradise: The Coconut
Express just saying "yet," the robin's egg
view, the hustling guarantee of
mañana. Imagine that. Love
spawning a flood. Summer left
hunting through a drought—the sixth
sense of ash; and Adam, that little blow.
What could we do with butter brush
scuttling Autumn? God's laws clattering
ghost claws through the branches'
sudden hush? The meadow was a subway
to a heart—a sudden stop. An opening.
And we took it.


X
by DANIEL SANDERS

1. the making of eve

adam, ex nihilo,
drugged in a tub
ice-filled in a hotel & you,
shadow next to the Gideon’s
using a very small trowel
putting her arms on.
you’ve spent hours
before the mirror/ posing
with your finger pointed,
deciding what belongs;
such intelligent design.

2. the marking of eve

in the surveillance monitors
they’re searching for large
leaves. six-day sleepless,
exhausted, the cathode ray
tube flickers in your room,
while you're chainsmoking
camels to calm your nerves.
storm out in your bathrobe
to give them bellybuttons &
punctuation marks, a pox
on their mitochondria,
you became I & the silence.

3. the marketing of eve

morning closes the flaps of your universe & you
tuck it under your arm. there's a curtain of frost
on the windowsill, damn AC kept you up all night,
the one night of rest. struggling to get your universe
& luggage through the hotel door together [shut
before your self can wedge in properly] you descend
the stairwell to your Lincoln & head to the convention
center for the exhibition--your booth next to the other
creators & their solutions for filling the loneliness.

for "the making of eve," "Ester See"
by Michael Workman
i ate the lill pomme and which came but spiders from my throat, each glad and weaving bits of irritance in my mind and stomach as i sat, watching him watching himself as a basketball star, drafted right from high school, his tattoos a traditional rebellion across a thousand frolicking intervals.

i don't usually say these things. as the creatures wracked my digestive tract. [i always say such things, i think: i'm not an evil woman, but i am, oh i am, tall as a star-cloud and rouged with blood]

"to spit is a feminine thing for her"

yes, thank you. yes, i spit so rarely and so daintily, like a calico dismissing an unfit sparrows-wing. to spit a spider web is a very strange thing, to spit spiders, stranger. and i think they gave their brood to me; i cough three a moment still (as far as moments go: breakfast, lunch, and donner, dinner). it is unbelievable, to think there has been no one to believe all this before, to feel the falling to the floor; it is unbelievable to think i am neither fact, nor facsimilie; origins aren't ancestries, i've seen that much on tv.

"and as i see is i score! the horny rim i rip from the backboard, creating needless facets of glass! net we eat tonight! net or stagneck! oh, the lady is always in red, she. always blossoming up from the bushoms lately, singing and sahing, 'shhhhhhhhaaaaahhhh--HU!' peekaboo! what a cradle-crazy dance, her falling down, her slips filled with inoculate milk, the wearing of exotic lipsticks. i see her play a reed all year now, like a box fertle, spotted and busy. her body plays the reed so well."

now webs accompany my winding; my loops are lapped with silken fixtures; stars curdle, and we spin milk with our howling. i can go all night...the venom keeps me hot and twisting, the tangles keep me moist and wishing...

could this last? but such a great past, intractable as deserts, barren as unfed ponds! though now (now it is now) i stalk galacial speed with melting speed; i infirm galactic need;

oh heh-millions of sons, i am the kiss that impels your countlessness.


The Making of Eve
by Helm Filipowitsch


Alone

I believe the moon wears earrings and shawl—
this October evening—
departing leaves are cymbals brushed
through another tune—waving note’s
tortured and fractured limbs.

Rain bends black windows into tears
and the drink I’ve stretched
across the table’s slow story
dreams such dreams as one might discover—
littered—Wednesday—at ten o’clock—in a neighbourhood pub.

Time passes—horse drawn milk wagon—milk box
to milk box—each minute named. My hand
moves with the ticking seconds
of Nancy—pale blue dress—hair back—
a mole shaped like loneliness on her neck.

I imagine god as an empty glass—waiting—expectant.
In his chair, he creates stories, pushes them towards the maturity of history.



Search

The city materializes in waves—traffic’s surf washed
against rush hour’s dark oil flowing down
sidewalks—leaking from ill-lit stores—
and the machinery of day brands notes on doors—tenor sax
from throats that have forgotten all names.

I have a name—for slow streetlights—
for those blinking eyes passing on prim escalators—
for words between in hallways—for the sounds doors learn
late at night when creaking conversations fade
and the moon hums a tune from history.

I have a name—for streets and wind—I have
a name for rain and trees—I have a name for alleys
and doors which are closed against—for the language of doors
between and for the punctuation of locks,
the metaphors keys become in evening’s tattered sunlight.

I believe in god the trinity, not god the solitary, not god
walking with me through a café, not god sitting with me, drinking coffee.



Discovery

To speak with you is to place chalk crayons in our hands—
to guide each other’s hands across the sidewalk and to watch
the sketches come into being. We name those snapshots
with poetry—sonnets for sadness—limericks for laughter—
and for love, rhyme separated by distance—yet alike.

To name a morning is to give it sunshine and coffee—
the reflection of your hair in the window—
and recite the story of the peach rose—how our hands
cupped and drank its colour from the air—
to name a morning is to devour it.

The monotheism of love is gray wind’s breath in locks—
petals falling from scree clouds—windows looking into fog.
Look for love in the eyes of a child scaling a harsh
driveway on her tricycle—playing hopscotch over ants—
reaching with her heart into tentative time.

The god of novels and haiku—the god of history is a jealous god.
Yet one stone placed upon another is creation.



Knowledge

Winter kneels on city’s chest—hunter—hunter—killing hope—
and cars gingerly negotiate the rising snow’s tide.
This morning I gathered the paper from the porch—
the roses are under drifts. We drank our coffee—read the news—
and in the kitchen’s silence we locked away our views.

The roadside pines dance to December tunes—slow dances—
cold dances of the number one. I’ll be home soon—
open the door to a dark room where our shoes have mated
through today and stale stories reside. I’ll be home soon—
prepare dinner—wait for you.

I wonder who could so long endure pulling the sun down
into horizon—so long endure in endings were there not a promise
of beginnings to follow—I wonder. As each minute passes
I place it on top of the one before—the phone doesn’t ring.
I will name this an epic in honour of you.

The god of triads is a story-teller—the god of triads is the god of choices—
the god of triads sits in the neighbourhood pub making dust into dust.

the making of Eve
by Ann Marie Eldon

Bear-basalt, dure boweled, cored into and ground
to no avail; earth nailed
down as if some unhalf-lifed, louring, plannish-pig triumphed.
Fricts. Defies not with mollities.
Thus question, thus quickling uptest,
wheresoever surface
topographies, drear steppe veneers, landscrapes,
testitry and flaunt.
Plains openly appetent, rivers with dry bed taunt, all
dream for want of something more. Sea,
vedic, pre-presumptative, underscores, transmogrifies
its vast vellum underbelly to ripple.
Little then from hard has come. Small calls.
Her voice, wet in cresseted asking,
brings forth rise, shore - banks, turns, forks, side issues,
deciduous decideings.
These how needy, how so ripely imploring, how so raw;
ready this world to be logicked
away, steadied by hand, by law. Yet the east blore bluffits
up a passage. Scores.
Lichens, mosses, grasses, ferns, incompossible in strict
land terms, turn flora, crawl
sunwards, spawn tree. Ah that you should be asking me
for the stark making of her!
She smells apple before she senses tongue. She knows
neither rib nor caul.
Brille blink slink, no noetic cetacean death preferable
to menses; unmarried she
engages. Thinks, bites, falls to defensive argumentation.
Time presses a momentary
vulnerary inculcation: hips joined, eyes sindicated, legs
four. Severed, they run
for cover. Worse, much worse, your lush alibi is
flawed, forever formulaic and blood brailles
each brother.