Second Place Winner: Sophie Soil   stark and naked   like a stripped bravado, at barely cracking into a reluctant dawn, she trips forward without apology or penitence, a            blood-trail dripping behind like a fluidity slithering across            the fierce terrain.  The night of stolen love, which always weaves a quintessential thrill of what isn’t anecdotal, sighed a promise of sweetness, then went remiss, like the             lover who is capable of leaving with the morning light,             slipping into the distance like an aqueous shadow.   oh, how the winds blow through her dormant fetus, all alone her swollen body, its temperature a neutral compass of her fear,           how prearranged ahead of time the semi-orbit sway of fate,           pressing its murkiness against her hereness, the somnolent future calling her by name, in hinged notes of quirky rubrics…   in awkward strides, she climbs the hill to catch a glimpse(if only          temporarily) at the midnight darkness (silhouetted with          round girth of moon) with which the child will merge, but all she sees is a black currency etched across a fearful sky staining to survive, like a fading star struggling at the jurisdiction of the sun.            feverishly, the smell of dung and wet dog hair everywhere.          she crows the birth scream, loud and bloodcurdling as a total scream can be,     the stillborn bloody bundle lying with regret in her clenched arms a thing rejected by her womb, by the cruel            world,  and the ground is ready to receive the stone-cold little             body.     Then silence…..and all the kitchen curtains closed.   as she wakens from her nightmare, her mind hinged to catch a paraphrase( what the neighbors’ tongues are spewing), she hears a            hundred hungry voices calling her a whore.        in the aftermath,             the rumor-mill gained a life of its own:      a thunderbolt of unkempt air, caustic fumes causing sores and spores along her soul……   Back to Oct/03 Winners Home