1999 Poetry Contest for Writers over 50

1999 Passager Poet: Marilyn Taylor

Honorable Mentions:

Cover Art by Ebby Malmgren

Editors for Issue 32
Mary Azrael
Rebecca Childers
Kendra Kopelke
Ebby Malmgren
Kathleen Fantom Shemer

Graphic Designer
Chris Carbone

The Agnostic's Villanelle

Maybe disbelieving is too easy,
and something's really out there in the dark.
Go ahead, say I'm crazy,

warn me that religion drives a fuzzy
argument—a little myth, a lot of murk—
still, disbelieving seems too easy.

Take emotions. Or desires. Sleazy
aberrations? Oddball quirks
of psycho-chemistry? I say it's crazy

to dismiss it all with breezy
scorn, or credit Science with the spark
that quickens. Just a touch too easy

for us—the devotedly blasé—
to claim with a smirk
true belief in disbelief. Aren't we crazy

if we allow ourselves a hazy
sense of something more at work?
You'll call me crazy,
but for me, disbelieving's too damned easy.

Marilyn Taylor
1999 Passager Poet

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Nostalgia in a Fish Market

Three billion years to get here,
resisting the home in waxed paper,

the burgeoning lungs. Fillet of scale
and flesh at rest in an aluminum pan.

A persistence of fins pokes through my blouse,
through the inevitable nets, appeal and drench

of salt informs my catalog of atoms.
We gathered and glittered in a living armada,

centuries before miasmic heat, a button-like
brain pushed into hemispheres. Sidewalks

rushed liked rivers to the shore.
Fins stiffened, then legs.

I had no idea of running with daggers,
or of the entrailed sea. Liquid

ceded to gas; ichthyic to animalia.
I wanted fingers more than clefted gills,

a continent of air. The music
of the water, gone to my ears.

Joanna C. Kelley

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When You Have Been a Prisoner

When you have been beaten
and the man gives you a stick and orders you to beat another,
perhaps you take the stick.

One time you refuse,
one time you refuse,
one time you fling it in the man's face,
one time you crack it on the back of someone as weak as you.
And the next time the man hands you the stick
he smiles,
he says, you did it before.

In the prisons where they interrogate
with water and cattle prod, with dentists who are not dentists,
surgeons who are not surgeons,
many men have been tested.
One who has been there told me everyone talks,
a time comes when you will say anything,
truth or lie, you talk.
Someone may die because of what you say.

The man hands you a stick.
Once again you refuse.
The man hands you a stick.

Sarah Webb

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About the cover

Ebby Malmgren created our colorful cover in honor of the poets who participated in this year's contest. Ebby was a Passager editor for many years, and continues to be a poet, potter, and monoprint artist. She thought monoprinting, a serendipitous process, was perfect for capturing the sense of discovery we found in the poems. To make the monoprint, Ebby spent a snowy afternoon laying down inks on a plexiglass sheet, placing thick cotton watercolor papers over the top of the swirls, and pulling prints to see what emerged.

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continue to Issue 31: Fall 1999