poemeleon - Mystery Box Contest Winners 2

And the winner of the 2nd Mystery Box Contest is....

Amy Karsmizki, for "A Picture's Worth"

Plus three runners up:

Evan Fleischer, for "Concerning the Box"

Margaret Flint Suter, for "Redemption Box"

Gail White, for "Breakables".

A Picture’s-Worth

In the Polaroid my head is down,
my shoulders drawn inward,
my eight-year-old body cocooning my trophy.
I see now that I was too big for
the gingham romper I wore,
and my unfettered hair hung in sweaty clumps -
the kind of disarray my mother usually fended
off with a scratchy green brush
and a pair of Goody rubber bands.

The eyes peering out from my pinched face
make me look like a hunted animal,
and indeed I remember feeling trapped there
under my father's heavy arm.
His pasted-on smile and 80's perm smack of falsity
and he is clutching his Slurpee like a life preserver.

The whole day was off kilter:
Munching on doughnut holes
in an endless line of cars snaking to Tulsa,
then a long morning in Dad's office
doodling on the marker boards
and re-reading Jane Eyre. After lunch we trudged
doggedly around a putt-putt course
until the phlegmy hum of the air-conditioning
at the flea market next door lured us in.

A mountain of a woman was behind the chipped
counter, her massive rear-end dwarfing
a battered stool. Her head was wrapped in a
bandana, just like Aunt Jemima on the pancake mix
we had at home. She winked at me and
smiled, closed-mouthed to protect the dip
of snuff that rested against her teeth.

We poked through piles of dusty junk,
me on one aisle, my father on another,
keeping our distance, circling like prize fighters,
leaving the thing with my mother
unspoken between us.
He wheezed patiently until I found
what I wanted to trade
for the damp bill in my hand.

At the register I fingered
the little swamp scene painted on
the wooden urn I had chosen.
My father prattled awkwardly on
about the Seminole Indians who were
driven here from Florida, maybe
from a marshy place just like that.
What I wanted to hear was
what nervous breakdown means and
when would Mom come home and
who was going to do my ponytails until then?

"Wait," the woman called across the cracked
parking lot, as she waddled up behind us.
"A photo of your special day out with Daddy."
She spat and smoothed her house coat
with a dimpled hand as we arranged ourselves
alongside the station wagon.
"Now smile!" We did our best.

-- Amy Karsmizki

* * *

Concerning the Box

Herculean coffee has now moved to the lakes.

Should we tell the floating Ego Eye about the three-legged frogs?

How easily life-jackets turn to sails?

How all the pebbles, fish (baby + adult), plankton, plants, lost shoes,
shoes that were built as ships and sunk into the sea will taste?

Here's hoping
it's all a snake trick.

-- Evan Fleischer

Redemption Box

Grandfather’s swollen knuckles smoothed the box.
Slowly carved the bamboo, one piece into two,
his ochre skin deepening in the sun as he worked.
The painting of the small lagoon near the rice fields
Grandmother did as she cooked the rice Grandfather
would carry in the box, mingled with what meat may
have been saved from last night’s offering -
scant chicken or fish from the lagoon.
Grandfather would scoop the grains of rice out,
a finger full at a time, rinsing the box cup out with tea
sold from a cart.

My father carried the box to the plantation to tap the rubber
two islands down the chain under the Dutch flag.
When that flag fell, he carried contraband under the rice,
traded to aid the colonials when he could,
their reward for his risk, to move him from his home when all was
over and condemn him for not doing more.

The box held perfectly, under a slight layer of rice,
the grenade my father used to toss into the office
of the Dutch East Indies company,
to shatter the glass, the white bodies into pieces.
As he capped the box,
slightly whistling, he placed the box into the basket
of his bicycle
and began to pedal home to supper.
Supper of rice and fish, the remains of which,
as tradition holds,
he would carry on his bicycle the next day
to his next stop.

-- Margaret Flint Suter

Breakables

When he walked out, she threw the box at him
and missed, but hit the door and broke the lid.
He'd bought the thing in Russia on a whim -
surely the dumbest thing he ever did -
cheap balsa wood and badly painted with
a stand of palms no Russian ever met -
but was knitted to their private myth:
a gift of love that left her in his debt
until she bought another stupid thing
and gave it to him. But before she could,
he told her that he wanted one last fling
and then that he was leaving her for good.
With glue and tears, she patched the lid and cried
and said that it was mended. But she lied.

-- Gail White

Thanks to everyone who entered our contest, and please check out the new Mystery Box (with a slightly revised format) here.