FensFund Awards Lisa Fay 2nd Place in Literary Contest, Poetry Category
Posted Saturday April 19 2014 at 3:23 pm.
Used tags: boston, poetry, vsa
Fenway Education & Neighborhood Support Fund recently awarded longtime VSA friend and artist Lisa Fay 2nd place in the Poetry Category of it's Literary Contest. The judges were: Charles Coe, published poet; Bennie DiNardo, Boston Globe Deputy Manager; and Cathy Jacobowitz, novelist and author. Lisa submitted four poems which together were chosen as the 2nd place winner. Here are the poems:
Polish Horses
The 55 bus shoots down Boston Common garage
stopping at an intersection
where the Polish horses stand:
their necks bent
and bodies fatigued.
No monument can measure defeat..
Whenever, I see them,
both my back and mind straighten up.
City officials evicted the horses,
finding them depressing.
I am depressed they're not there.
Every statue cannot be comfortable
like "Make Way for the Ducklings" -
just compelling.
Freedom is a millennium
of microscopic impossibilities
made possible
when we look.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Before there were porn sites,
there was Edna
sleeping with a phone book of people:
a different person on every page,
mixing the sexes as well
as though they were clothes
to be tossed aside
or salads to be tossed around.
No wonder it took her biographer
30 years to complete the book.
Living Room Poem
While getting my hair cut on West Street,
I look across the street,
imaging Elizabeth Peabody parading around her living room
teaching women German, French, Italian
from books in her foreign lending library
before colleges accepted women
and free public libraries existed.
There, Margaret Fuller started "Conversations"
exalting women to believe and achieve.
Nowadays, there is plastic in the living room
as if it were a "Keep Off the Grass" for dogs.
Even the plastic is dusted off.
The Math of Marriage
"You know enough people
to run for President,"
my friends tell me,
"yet you can't help me
find me a date, let alone marriage."
"There's nothing wrong with you,"
I tell them.
"It's a numbers game,
100 women to 1 man,"
the only time I will ever
sound like Einstein.
"Opportunity will take you so far,
if the numbers are not there,"
I tell my friend who cries
about being perennially single.
"They live in cemeteries
courtesy of war."
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