Three Merriconeag Poets Honored at at 2011 Poetry Festival

Airplane Armrests

              by Leif Anderson

Murky oval window

knees crushed like broken tree branches

eating single-serving of poorly salted nuts,

and lukewarm high altitude carbonation.

His meaty arm advances slowly

across the armrest,

snoring flecks of stringy saliva

tremor and gleam in harsh white light.

My elbow tries vainly to hold position,

slipping fast under forceful lipid mountains.

The space between us swells and falls,

rigid armrest drawn sharply across.

Our arms silently fall into dance,

giving and taking back inches of slick plastic,

sickly swish of fabrics our only conversation.

After nine restless eye-ball aching hours, I

still don't know his name, or

if he likes salted nuts and soda.

Irrelevant Nonsense

                  by Jeremy Colson

Strawberry skies and sherbet clouds.

A crepuscular punch bowl.

Licorice lamp-posts

populate the Italianesque boulevard.

A quacking multitude of moustaches

flock south as jimmies on whipped cream.

Crumbling cobblestone crenellations

mix in a castle stew.

Bubble-wrap hillsides

coat sealed wine bottles,

Next to a stack of vanilla wafers,

to be served abruptly and without warning.

I take a bite of polyurethane,

and chew slowly.

A drawbridge tongue mocks me,

so I trample it.

Flinging nonsense like anchovies,

I have seeded the courtyard with vocabulary.

This trans-dimensional blabbering

is pepperoni on pie.

Unfortunately deprived of ginger ale,

I wander into the gatehouse

And contemplate the meaning of beverage.

Sunset

     by Emma Rhodes-Armstrong

From the top of the hill I see it,

red and golden in all its splendor,

glimmering in the water

from the sprinkler

in someone's front yard.

It reflects on the walls of a white house,

turning it pink.

Even the trunks of the trees are tinged with it,

with that color so bright

and vivid

that is has no name.

It lingers on the clouds,

on the sleek metal of passing cars,

on the wings of birds overhead as they soar

above the world

seeing it all from within it.

The world seems to be having a last moment

of extravagance

before the color fades

and the sky darkens into night.