First Place Winner: Sophie Soil     War Years   I lived those funked-up years in the silence of a total scream, brooding, bleeding,       unsure which way to go:    up, down; bearing what was infused:   that harsh and cruel blast of turbulence and stormy petrel where fear is like a yo-yo hovering in the air: melding with ungenerous margins of error against an exploding background, which could have been us blown away;   always drawing and redrawing dreamscapes;    taken in, digested, reassembled, shaped and splayed over the abyss of war, then broken into bits and shards and thrown to the wind scraping what was left of danky streets with icy asphalts, wondering:  do you think we’ll make it?   there I spent my days gathering the pieces of my fate, floundering in tiny mud-floored rowhouses riddled by gunfire, mud and blood splattered on the doorsteps, in front of which tows of phantom-people stained the sidewalks with their shadows, and nights wrapping them up in sourdough nightmares; undertows that ever drew me downwards…downwards….   while an ocean away, they bided their time, going to parties, reading newspapers, full of dour news about a world away suffering a vitriol they could hardly imagine;   years spent in shortages of silk stockings and canned salmon, waiting for the roar to deaden and the ashes dissipate into the cruel sky….. Back to Oct/03 Winners Home