Below, the poem that won the 2006 Meridian
Editors' Prize, "Okie Monarchs." Next year it will be
reprinted in the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2,
on Gival Press.
 OKIE MONARCHS
I never saw so raped a countryside,
this Oklahoma “City,” so-called…
the derricks jacking in and out, obscene
beside the swings, the library… crude rules;
mall posterboard and neon wink their lies
across the Broadway shaft, like mica flickers
across a pit, across the tumbling wrappers…
like condoms, sacks of children’s souls… pale
along the median. Never saw a hell
to match this drive-through. When the Monarchs
arrived, they waggled in alternative
rush-hour flow, in cloverleafs mid-air,
among the starving greens of Lowes and Target.
More migrants -- lovely, sure, but only Okies --
they spawn, they go, their wings like hot-rod flames,
some Heineken-green, never saw the like
before… once, in glossy springtime, Cape Cod,
a luna moth, a monster, startled me,
and it was green, and I thought, Dickinson,
gone midnight, strange, her “noon” gone moon; I thought,
Nabokov, sexy lepidopterist,
ripe youth and beauty in his net… Now,
…
these Red-Dirt flyers, scribbling on the air,
it’s like a note you jot in mid-commute,
no poem. Autumn’s on us, Hallowe’en,
the black and orange… décor that’s not unlike
these blossom-cruisers: Little People, up
on brooms, their dance to Satan stained the blood
of sunset; male hooks female; howling mute,
invisible yet vivid upward love coils,
a couple climbing spiral steeps, at work
against the vertigo, a pair of pilgrims…
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