Winners of SFR's annual contest take on politics, sex, Santa Fe-and so much more.
Last week, after many weeks of patient waiting, the phone began to ring at SFR and entrants to the 2005 writing contest began to wonder: Are you ever going to announce the winners?
We wondered it ourselves a few times. The response to our call for poems about the Bush administration alone was overwhelming (and endlessly amusing; we're half-tempted to print them all, not just the winners. Who knew so many things rhymed with Bush?).
As for non-fiction, writers took up the challenge to consider the nature of home and, although we were thinking about Hurricane Katrina when the contest began, it was still a surprise to have the winning essay come from a relocated New Orleans resident.
In fiction, however, is where all bets were off. Out there, in our City Different, there are some active, active imaginations, and even the constraints we placed on the writers didn't keep the number of entries from far surpassing those of previous years.
In this week's paper you'll find all the winners' names. We also are printing all the winning poetry entries, two of the non-fiction pieces and the first-place fiction winner. We will continue printing the winning entries in the early issues of 2006.
As always, all judging was anonymous. SFR appreciates the help of poet and teacher Miriam Sagan; teacher and SFR columnist Rob Wilder (whose book,
Daddy Needs a Drink
, will be published by Bantam this spring) and CSF creative writing teacher Marika Brussel, who has had essays and fiction published in numerous magazines. Her story, "A Fragile Panic" will be published this spring in Hospital Tales, and "A Leap Behind" will be published in Pointe Magazine.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all who entered.
And the winners are…
Fiction
This year's fiction category was unassigned, but all writers were required to use the phrases "Whole Foods parking lot," "Living Wage" and "Zozobra."
First Place
"Cruisin'"
Felice Lopez
is originally from Hopkins, SC and moved to Santa Fe with her boyfriend Ryan. Lopez studied studio art and English at The College of Charleston and is a portrait artist who had a show last year in Zele Café. She is also a soccer coach for the Eldorado Earthquakes.
Second Place
"From Baghdad to Santa Fe"
Greg Solano
is the sheriff of Santa Fe County. He also is at work on a novel. The idea for "From Baghdad to Santa Fe" came from talking to some of his officers who came back from Iraq and researching the effects of war on those who serve.
Third Place
"Dealing"
Richard Ferber
is a longtime Santa Fean. His wife is local musician Polly Tapia Ferber. He's been writing fiction, nonfiction and poetry for 10-something years under the pen name Richard Jay Goldstein, to honor his father, Herman Goldstein. He kept body and soul together until recently with a day job in emergency medicine; now he's much happier writing full time and living in debt. He's also now a student at the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. Ferber won first place in the non-fiction category in last year's contest.
Fiction First Place
Cruisin'
BY FELICE LOPEZ
1
Standing in the Whole Foods parking lot, the sky took up more of my vision than the ground. It glowed electric blue for whole moments, cloudless and creaseless. I stood staring up at it with a bag of rice flour pulling the thin plastic of the double-bagged grocery bundle down on the flesh of my palm. After my sister, Lacy, had been pregnant with her baby for four months she developed an allergy to wheat. Now everything tasted grainy, made with replacement flours: rice and tapioca and soy and corn. She was already depressed and weighed down with hormones, crying and swollen in Fruit of the Loom.
2
When you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, the sky and the water are all that there is, it's all horizon and blue on blue or green or brown or black, or any combination of those colors. In the desert the sky and the land eat at each other, except for at night, when they calm down and spoon. Turquoise on adobe red or a gristly beige. My sister and I had been working on a cruise ship when she got pregnant. She would wake up and I could hear her vomit hitting the bowl of our cabin's tiny plastic toilet. Then we would walk up to the dining room and stare out at the ocean from the overpoweringly clean glass of the windows while we rubbed the thumbprints free of water glasses and butter knives.
I figured it out before she told me. I was worried that she wouldn't tell the father before our contract was up with the ship. I hadn't even known she'd spent a night out of our cabin. She never introduced me to him. We got off of the boat, and I carried her Adidas duffel bag as well as my own into the fading heat of Charleston, South Carolina in September. We got into a cab driven by a man with a Gullah accent so heavy I couldn't understand him at all.
"I didn't tell him," she said, staring out the open window at cars wrapped tight in clear plastic layered to opaqueness. I sighed my disapproval.
We bought a car off of the side of the road, a phone number soaped onto the windshield, along with "$200 O.B.O." It got us to Dallas on I-20 before it broke down, sizzling and steaming. We'd left the car on the side of the highway. When I opened the trunk to pull out our duffel bags the wind poured in and a pile of flyers advertising a sale at Yarn Barn drifted into the oncoming headlights. They lit up and flashed white and grey. The flyers had come with the Ford, along with a strand of condoms linked together in the glove compartment. I wondered how long the car would sit there.
3
We bought bus tickets and rode in the aluminum belly of the bus with kids hiding behind sunglasses, ears hidden by headphones, truckers lonely and sleeping or lonely and talking, men with liquor seeping out of their pores that you could smell from two rows away. We read magazines, newspapers, layering them to fill out the crossword puzzles in our laps. Lacy started to write out names for the baby in ball point pen on the inside cover of a thick Vogue we'd found tucked in the blue and green polyester of the seat. She started three columns: boy, girl, and either. She wanted it to start with an R because our aunt's name had started with an R and she had just died. That's how we named in my family. I traced the names I liked with my fingertip into the grime that clung to the inside of the bus window.
Ramona.
Rory.
Ray.
River.
Ruby.
4
We were in Santa Fe in nineteen hours and forty-five minutes. The wind whipped sand into the air outside of the bus station and into our nostrils and ears to rustle inside of our heads. We caught a taxi into town. The driver had dark hair short on the top of her head and long in a layer down to her shoulders. The sun cast her shadow onto the visor turned up onto the ceiling of the car. It looked like the shadow of a cartoon character, spiky. She listed for us her favorite things about Santa Fe while our glances darted between her and out the windows.
"No humidity…" (adobe crept past us in shades of oranges and peaches and pale coffee shades.)
"There's over three hundred art galleries in this town…" (the sun set into the crevices between squared off houses and shops studded with cylindrical logs. Its shades of purple and yellow drenched the bottoms of the clouds above it.)
"The Living Wage is up to eight-fifty…" (a Husky looked out at us from behind a wrought iron gate. His hair stood up on his back.)
"…best green chile in the world. Right here…" (the road hummed beneath the tires of the cab and I could not see any grass, just orange dirt straining against the edges of the street.)
5
The cab pulled into a driveway lined with coyote fence, planes of twisted wire and wood. We knocked on our uncle's door. He hadn't seen us in long enough that there was a moment that it didn't register who we were. His beard grayer than we remembered it and lying curled on his pot belly, tight against a cotton V-neck. Then his eyes flickered alive and a smile ignited his mouth into a laugh, a short chuckle, a disbelieving snort.
We ate Hamburger Helper and canned corn, mashed potatoes made from a snowy powder dotted with papery chives. We ate with the dog, Memphis, twisting about our legs beneath the table. He would peak up at us and lick our elbows.
He got up to answer the telephone and Lacy whispered into my ear.
"I'm not going to tell Uncle Jack yet."
Over her shoulder I watched Memphis curl his tongue onto her plate and steal a sizable amount of corn bathed in margarine. I could keep a secret.
After dinner we piled across the bench seat of Jack's Toyota truck and bounded towards Zozobra, a puppet aflame with the cheers of the city. And all of the children chanted, "burn him, burn him," until his right knee was ignited prematurely with fireworks and the crowd opened their mouths at the anticlimax. I could smell fry bread and the chemical-y smell of firework smoke, Old West gunpowder. A group of big men in black leather jackets and deep blue jeans drank Budweiser beside us and smoked cigarettes, rocking back and forth on their boots. One of them had a ponytail tied off in sections. He offered to let Lacy sit on his shoulders so that she could see. From below I could see the scar on the underside of her chin from when she fell off of the handlebars of my bike when she was seven. The scar was in the shape of a V, widening at her neck. She had to get stitches, and I'd spent my allowance that week on Tweety Bird band-aids that would peak out at you whenever she craned her head upwards.
She rested both of the palms of her hands on the top of his head. She lifted a sparkler up and looked like a poor imitation of the Statue of Liberty, her hair feathered out around her face in a crown. She was still small-framed with a belly, four foot eleven on her tip-toes. The sparkler sent little glowing embers down onto the crowd below her, nose-diving fireflies. Her sweater was dotted with powdered sugar. I watched her wrap her belly in the crook of her right arm, her left arm holding the sparkler above her. She perched there illuminated in the light of a fire started to destroy gloom, to insure an exultant future. A wind picked up, revved up the fire, and it all looked so much brighter all of a sudden.
And the winners are…
Nonfiction
This year's non-fiction category was "There's No Place Like Home."
First Place
"Blink of an Eye"
Alexander Lasseigne III
grew up on Bayou Lafourche and moved to New Orleans as soon as he could. After graduating from University of New Orleans, he began to work in the film industry in both casting and production until Hurricane Katrina hit, at which time he moved to Santa Fe. Lasseigne also was a semi-finalist in the Duke City Shootout film-script competition.
Second Place
"Anywhere" K Lee Cardinal
, 24, is at work on her first novel, and also works at Wild Mountain Outfitters. She would like to thank the ghost of DH Lawrence, and her friend Joey, for rescuing her computer from the clutches of a madman so she could write this piece.
Third Place
"Jane Doesn't Live Here Anymore" Ed Foust
likes to travel and recently returned from France. He also has lived in Japan and traveled in Asia and Europe. He is new to writing. He wrote the piece about someone he knew because he was struck by the unfortunate, all-too-common tragedy of seeing a beautiful person whose life slipped away.
Nonfiction First Place
Blink of an Eye
BY ALEXANDER LASSEIGNE III
I keep waking up wondering where I am. Where's the girl who used to be at my side stealing the sheets? Oh that's right, I'm in Santa Fe. It's been over a month now since my migration from the Little Easy, New Orleans, and still I'm having trouble coming to the realization that I'm here.
My life in the Crescent City was far from perfect, but it was comfortably familiar. I used to be in the film industry, but was secretly wishing for a way out. My girlfriend and I were having problems so we broke up one day before Hurricane Katrina hit the coast.
We were fighting as we packed. I remember thinking loudly to myself to drown out the slamming doors and low blows, "OK, only the lightweight electronics. Anything else will be too much. I'll be back in a week tops."
More angry words flew. "I don't have to take this anymore. I'm out." No goodbye. So angry my ears were ringing, or was that the sting of truth? Where do I go? I'll follow that cloud. It looks nice.
Forty-eight hours and 50 failed calls later I'm finally in Houston. Where's my ex? Is she alright? How in hell is my best friend going to survive this storm stuck out on a barge floating in the mouth of the Mississippi? Couldn't those oil field assholes airlift him out? Too many thoughts, and not enough information or communication. Huddled in front of a friend's TV while everyone else was at work I played
drinking games with CNN. Gulp of beer for every new shot of the damaged Superdome. A full chug for every plea of help.
Shot of whiskey for every time an anchor butchered our street or city section names. Tchoupitoulos? Ninth Ward. Ninth Ward, dammit!
All it took was one day of constant media bombardment to see that nothing was getting any better for my sad city. The water kept washing in, and I was helpless to aid my people crying out on television each relentless hour. The film industry won't want to touch New Orleans for years even if the "film gods" consider the risk is worth taking in the future.
Let's recap. No girl, no job, everything I've been working towards since college just got washed away in one sudden, wet swoop. It sounds like I'm one lost dog away from a bad country song.
So I headed west and didn't look back. This is where the cloud I followed finally stopped and disappeared. I might move again if it comes back, but I've come to love this city. This is where heaven touches the earth. I've come from six feet below to seven thousand feet above and I've learned to never take people or places for granted because it can all change in the blink of a ten-mile-wide eye.
Peace to my people from the Dirty South spread all across the map. Stay up. We love you.
Nonfiction Second Place
Anywhere
BY K LEE CARDINAL
I am sitting on a cold concrete porch in San Cristobal, my current home, a heteroclite cluster of dwellings occasionally mentioned in discussions of DH Lawrence, but rarely seen, even by those most familiar with New Mexico. The green sign off the highway at the top of a dirt road winding down a hill and into a valley indicates that I am in San Cristobal, New Mexico-but I could be anywhere.
At my back stands an adobe-and-log cabin, sliced up into little wood-paneled rooms, not spacious by any means but adequate enough to house a girl, her cat, and all the traveling ephemera in plastic boxes she has collected from various living situations over the years. At my front stretches a dirt road with an occasional pickup rumbling down from the highway, lined by substantially ancient trees depositing their last leaves on the ground in another fall, a season which must seem like a minute, or even a second, to these old, content men unceasingly rooted in the ground. Under the largest of these trees, between me and the road, sits my Jeep, gray with dirt, lying in kinetic wait for direction, plain but for the few clues I've stuck to it in remembrance of the places I've lived. I Heart Pitkin; Teton Valley, USA; Detroit, printed in industrial-looking type; I Support Taos County Search and Rescue, the newest. "We're all here 'cuz we're not all there," an appropriate reference to Colorado Springs, sticks to the bumper right below the license plate, "Great Lakes State," a dreamy representation of the Mackinac bridge in the throes of a hyperbolic sunset. These stickers tell a predictable story: girl grows up in the suburbs of some flat, beige, industrial place. Girl gets bored, reads
Dharma Bums
, listens to too much Bob Dylan, drops out of high school. Girl sees the picture passed down from so many generations of American collective fantasy-Out West-and once she gets that purple mountain majesty in her head she hardly has enough time to hug mom and dad in the driveway, to see off envious friends, to notice Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, before she's found herself in one of those square states festooned on the map with gaudy orange and brown topographies, inhabited by young folks just like herself, executing in one way or another the same fantasy she lives. She never stops to ponder the concept of home, until it's many years too late and she doesn't have an inkling of understanding to what that means anymore. She's on the road, loading and unloading boxes into various diminutive hovels in various states, watching the digital numbers of mileage on her old vehicle grow higher, how many miles since Detroit? Two thousand, ten thousand, thirty thousand, fifty thousand. How many miles does it take until she stops on some roadside overlook, tired, dirty, smoky, looks out at yet another postcard-worth diorama, and says, "Shit, I'm tired of this. I want home."
She knows people from the Midwest who have given up and moved back, and maybe she should do that, too, but then she remembers that that version of home didn't feel like anything but appearing just like the house where she grew up. She would go around touching things (the dog's soft head, the crackled splintered picnic table, the cereal-colored upholstery in the suck-you-right-in couches in the living room) and smelling the air, the pungently musty basement, standing down there under the low rafters amongst the asbestos-wrapped pipes for a good half an hour just inhaling, trying to verify. Spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove in the tiny kitchen; mother and grandma who smell like years of holding babies and gossiping and drinking tea and knitting and standing in front of the fireplace. All a very convincing diorama, but she could only stay as long as the detailed mountebank could keep her fooled, until she got a peek at the man behind the curtain running the whole gig, and she'd be gone. Not home.
All those places mentioned on the back of her Jeep were home at one point, and they seem so flawlessly welcoming in the favorable light of her memory. Colorado Springs, the eagle's nest on top of a rambling chopped-up bungalow with a row of windows looking out on Pike's Peak she shared with her then-boyfriend in a mock-up of domesticity, was home until he took off to Thailand to find himself. Teton Valley, a stretch of road and a collection of towns sitting like loyal dogs at the feet of the Tetons, served well as home once too, houses full of friends serving up companionship, solidarity and green chile enchiladas on Christmas Eve. All those people were transients like herself, though, and they're gone to New Zealand, to Alaska and Utah. Without those people it is just another town. Same with the rest of the places she's lived in. None of them could be home, not anymore. They have all been washed away in a sea of twenty-somethings coming and going. She knows that she, at least for the time being, will remain a part of this peripatetic body, and has an inkling that home lies somewhere therein, though she can't quite see it. She keeps moving, gears turning literally and figuratively, until she starts to get it. She begins to understand a concept perhaps her rambling heroes of literature and song had not.
Months later she sits on an ever-warming concrete porch, watching the morning turn to day before trees and a dirt road. She is in San Cristobal, New Mexico, but it doesn't matter what house or town or dot on a map, what city with the perfect group of people, perfect job, perfect demographics, she inhabits. She has come to know that home is not an entity. Like resignation or acceptance, hard-won whether we travel or stay put, a necessity in light of our mutability-home is a decision.
She could be anywhere, and she would be there.
And the winners are…
Poetry
This year's poetry category was "The Bush Administration."
First Place
"A Villain's Villanelle"
Emily Withnall
lives in Las Vegas, NM with her husband and 2-year-old daughter. Her work also currently appears in The Pittsburgh Quarterly Online.
Second Place
"Adulteration"
Walt Whetham
lives in El Rancho, NM. He is originally from Caspar, Wyo., hometown of Dick Cheney.
Third Place
"Dear Dubya in the Nude
Now I Can Love You"
Of her poem,
Judith Toler
writes: "I like being surprised by a poem, and 'Dear Dubya' sure sneaked up on me. There I was, enjoying a 'Jon Stewart' moment as I looked at a satirical painting of a president I detest, when all of a sudden I felt touched by his naked vulnerability. I was able to meet him, at least for a little while, in that 'field beyond right and wrong,' that field of our common humanity."
Poetry First Place
A Villain's Villanelle
BY EMILY WITHNALL
"I'm losing focus with all this background noise
(Dubya's comment for falling approval rates),
All ye' Americans, look at our great joys!"
What is it exactly that so annoys
our president, provoking him to state
"I'm losing focus with all this background noise?"
It is with great tactic that Bush employs
the media to make us all appreciate
America's great democratic joys;
our women's freedom is the reason he destroys
nations. In rubble the Afghani women wait,
oh, but now he's losing focus with all the background noise.
Could our collective silence provide buoys
to our poor leader's sinking ship? "Concentrate,"
Fox News says, "on our American joys."
Hush, subjects! Join the silence of the white house boys
(there are noble reasons to manipulate);
he's losing focus with all this background noise.
Democracy? Well, no, but let's appreciate our American joys!
Poetry Second Place
Adulteration
BY WW WHETHAM
flirtation
reciprocation?
false representation
intoxication?
9-11 exploitation
mutual appreciation?
swift boat accusation
admiration?
WMD fabrication
infatuation?
apathetic situation
adoration?
naïve population
Nov. 2nd capitalization
inauguration
dirty sensation
pheromone indication
lip gravitation
escalation
perspiration
rumsfeld dilation
tongue exploration
earlobe fixation
palpitation
brassiere navigation
ripeness investigation
nipple elevation
cheney inflammation
filthy invitation
clothing liberation
thigh separation
clitoris stimulation
involuntary lubrication
hard vibration
nasty occupation
bad temptation
oral titillation
penile inflation
unholy vocalization
Iraq elongation
KY application
levitation
pachyderm penetration
awkward rotation
rampant fluctuation
deep oscillation
acceleration
increased gyration
bush administration
BUSH administration
BUSH ADMINIstration
BUSH ADMINISTRATION
gratification???
back to masturbation
Poetry Third Place
Dear Dubya in the Nude
Now I Can Love You
BY JUDITH TOLER
after the painting
by Kayti Didriksen
naked in the painting-
do you know the one
I mean? you're stretched
out on a divan, like Olympia
your body gentle as a girl's
but no black ribbon
circling your throat,
no pretty bracelet
no swelling bosom
but nipples tart with air
and like Olympia one hand
protecting private parts-
twin testicles
vulnerable and soft
as a rabbit's underbelly
your penis lolling
to one side
now I can love you, Mr President
though it's not easy-after all
you're not being offered
a bouquet of flowers, oh
no, Cheney in black face
proffers a golden crown
shaped like an oil rig
topped with a tiny cross-
the title, "King George at Leisure"
tells it all, and I after all
could never vote for you
not even for that beautiful body
for your face strange as Olympia's
mysterious as the Mona Lisa
as you look past the picture plane
and away from the silver platter
away from the golden tower
toward some unseen place
more private than private parts
thin lips pursed barely in tight smile
holding back not so much smirk
as terror
facing those fields
blacker than oil
now only now can I love you
