We’d like to congratulate 3 former Drunken Boat contributors, JoAnna Novak, Paul Lobo Portugés, and Lucy Anderton for being semi-finalists in the 2011 Snowbound Series Poetry Chapbook Award.
Want to check out their skills?
The German sky
did not carethat we were gone—nor,
I expect, did the friends, northe cherry trees. I left
with newred welts down my back. Mother
said: this hurts memore than you. Where
did she hear that? I thoughtshe was an unmarked
child. I recallthose days smelled
thin. There were hedgehogseverywhere drinking
milk out of saucers
—Lucy Anderton, O Memory, How I Choose You
[click to read the full poem and hear Lucy read her poem]
Cigarette butts make unusual mosaics in the so-called lawn of the heavily policed park on Mr. Wilshire’s boulevard. Gringo kings talk about breeder reactors and beget ribbons of fear in los vatos of the City of Angels. A footloose muchacho throws his paper plane past billboards of powdered white pudenda admired by hairless blue blonde never-never-land boys wrestling in surviving dandelions. Across the loud street of modern spirituals lowriders drag their jailed pain screeching past lonely Joe’s t.v. repair shop. Booty commercials flash upside down in the smog streaked neon window.
Brown buffalos get English in workaday schools a meaningful tattoo of unforgiving blood if they’re lucky. Bullets curse barrio poets who eat them like dulces then spit out histories of pain.
—Paul Lobo Portugés, Barrio Journal East L.A.: Living the Recession
[click to read paul's full essay]
—thatched and avocado green and orange, a bunch of colors he’d never be able to stomach—and, tangled in those sheets, he’d sleep jagged, dreaming of getting out of the country with some of the honeys and babies whose scalps he’d massage during the day, those girls in polyester and denim bellbottoms with asses in fruity candy-colored panties, asses that reminded him of those dumb postcards Alfonse kept sending him from Italy—his older brother, apprenticing with the real masters, those men in Milan that would fly here or there for a weekend, their scissor skills, their blow drying, their foil applications so masterful that masterpieces all over Europe—
—JoAnna Novak, The Hairdresser
[click to read joanna's conceptual fiction]
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