PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINATIONS - XXXVI

The following poets and poems have been nominated by 10x3 plus for 2010:

Michael Gessner, "HOODOOS"

Michael Gessner, "PARTHENOGENESIS"

Mary Christine Delea, "Occupants"

Lamont Palmer, "Politician in a Boat"

Michael Bazzett, "Rooms and Days"

Sonja James, "Passing Storm at Woods Hole"


PUSHCART PRIZE selections for edition XXXVI will be announced in April, 2011.
Good luck to these poets and poems.

Primrose - Tomas de Faoite

Delicate childhood flowers
flourishing in shady places.
Raindrops with second thoughts
trying to get back to the sun,
or the sun with second thoughts
wanting back what it didn't need
billions of years before.
No wonder they smell so fragile,
an almost indecisive smell,
not knowing where to belong,
here, in shady places
or back at center, the sun.

Tomas DE FAOITE
First published in DUST,
Reinart Edities

from THIS GREAT UNKNOWING - Denise Levertov

from "Celebration"

"Brilliant, this day--a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green--
whether it's ferns or lichens or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes--
greener than ever before."


from This Great Unknowing, LAST POEMS
Denise LEVERTOV

Appalachian Night - Mark Jackley

Enfolded by pure darkness
a train slips through the hills,
past the occasional litter of homes
leaking yellow light.

In a kitchen window
the silhouette of an enormous man who thinks,
gazing at the train,
he could love anyone on board.


Mark JACKLEY
Collected in THERE WILL BE SILENCE WHILE YOU WAIT
Plain View Press

September 11, 2001 - Mark Jackley

Returning in darkness
to her mother's, my two-year-old glanced
at our neighborhood woods
and whispered, Listen, monsters.

Before I could reason with her
she climbed into my arms,
placed a tiny hand on my mouth
and commanded, Shhh.


Mark JACKLEY
Collected in THERE WILL BE SILENCE WHILE YOU WAIT, Plain View Press

Lines for Salinger at Ninety - Lamont Palmer

Tables are often "lousy with glasses",
a messy significance on Broadway.
Will we see the world as it is or as
it was, when it was only a globe in class?
Often lives soar wildly like the Lunts
over the East River. This is theatre,
the cynical lessons taught and told,
the old man, Jerome, and the young neck-tied boy
of wisdom, in one pimply universe.
We wonder about the absent ducks
(perhaps our own imminent absence)
and the "secret slobs", untested for the better.
The pianos are playing and the big men
are playing them. The noise is closing in,
trains are barreling to nowhere quickly,
holidays no longer support the tinsel
they cling to. It smacks of grim martinis,
the misanthropy of the dazed dim bubbles
springing up in the glass of a long life.
I need rest, like the boy: time away
from situations, contrivances and
f-words (cold implications) in rude stairwells.


Lamont PALMER
Used by permission of Lamont Palmer.

10x3 plus PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINATIONS 2009

Congratulations to the following nominees:

"Forever" -- John Kay
"Elegy for No One" -- Ron Padgett
"Primavera" -- George Szirtes
"Winter Walk" -- Llewellyn McKernan
"The Long Goodbye" -- Llewellyn McKernan
"Still As I Was" -- Dzvinia Orlowsky

Thank you to all the 10x3 poets who appeared in the #4 issue. I was only able to publish one journal this year, but it was still a difficult decision selecting six poems for the Pushcart.

Good luck to these poets and I hope to see their work presented in the 2009 Pushcart Prize edition.