Once again, The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. Now in its twenty-seventh year, it is an annual contest for poets whose work has not been published previously in book form. The new winners are: Amy Beeder, Bryan Dietrich, Monica Ferrell and Joanna Goodman. This year’s judges are Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips and Marie Ponsot. In the competition, whose manuscripts are judged anonymously, distinguished former winners include Susan Mitchell, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Arthur Smith and David St. John. This year’s winners will read their poems at Discovery/The Nation ’01 at 8:15 pm on Monday, April 23, at The Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue (92nd Street and Lexington Avenue) in New York City. –Grace Schulman, poetry editor

I understand the necessary lie, that pasty face he passes off for work, the interest vested in his paper tiger. But, frankly, three in a bed is not what I had planned. Each night that I slip–calling him, from some stark peak of passion, Clark–the covers grow more crowded, the issue, more cumulous.

To which side do I cleave, then? On which thunderous thigh do these nails leave no trace? Though there are times I enjoy such naughtiness (the occasional quick one in Perry’s office, a hot kiss on the fly), I still find it hard to divide time between what he is and what he’s had to hide to be just

that. Don’t get me wrong, Diary, I love the both of him, but these days, when I send him out for squeeze cheese and chips, when he comes back, Midway Mart sack in one hand, would-be thug in the other, I can’t help wondering…. Should I prefer this Superman who saves a world a week, or he who’s learned to live his life

by loaning it his cheek.

BRYAN DIETRICH

‘The soul is a number moving by itself’   –Aristotle, De Anima

It is not cold at the top of the stairs. The years strike like radium drops. There is a little door, there is a little lock, There are many good machines whose purposes are lost. In the plump and tidy cabinets The red drawers are full of numbers Irrational and fatly simpering, While the white drawers have numbers Imaginary and drifting, And I am one of those.

Oh, the furnace wheezes, the charwoman sweeps, The wood sighs and settles and the dormouse sleeps. Don’t try to look at me directly.

MONICA FERRELL

Rooster Shadow

It’s not by chance that as this house turns to rot, the outer rooms fill up with feathers: jackdaw and grackle black, grit-colored slivers of sparrow or finch that grub for crumbs on every sidewalk.

Don’t be fooled by thrash or rapture: a bird is only vitriol, a lizard’s foot, gristle and a sack of stones, diviner of nothing but endings. If you doubt it, think of cockfights

or starlings’ pulse against the rain-wet glass each Spring returning to shock you, a darkness like blood in the yolk. Spurious, plagiarist– Amid thick leaves I saw the wink of black eyes waiting in dark pines, the snow-broken greenhouse.

On my stairs is a long rooster’s shadow; nights the rafters host a storm of chatter, the breeze of a thousand wings; though in the morning dirty legions can rise silent from one winter’s tree.

AMY BEEDER

Tebaide

Ahead, no singular, no grief. Silicon retina, artificial cochlea, tongue: we are learning how best to transcribe spirit by tracking chemical release. To cobble soul and sense together open here, the nerve: insert. Localized interior. My room looks west, and north; late day’s gray veneer aroused by breeze. Months pass, moth-filled and uncontained, since we slipped through ovals in San Marco’s dormer cells, looking down through glass to see back towards black mountains’ robed retreat, blue fields, hands floating out of time. It was neither mystical nor real, but it was both. A thin lather of rain fell last night. I woke at four again and listened to first birdcalls swerve along the eaves. Voices scored for feeling and depth: tassled, metallic rows of rants unravel meridians. Immediate, unmediated world. The talk here’s about sacrifice– Who would give up body first, who mind. I try not to be seen or heard, though apparently all we want is to be found.

*

Risen chambers along twigs of black gum, butternut: buttercup playing Camaldoli’s forest floor. I held one to your chin, silence stretching light’s expanse between us. Measured rhythms, equilibriums: that the shapes might fit; mass to rhapsodic mass, vein to leaf, leaf to branch; error to its thought; that in the symmetry between hand and touch we might find not just relief. I’ve lost track of how I’ve hurt you. Out of stone huts hermits emerge like mist’s cargo, dissolve without blundering into air. They’ll come down the mountain in old age. We watch from outside the gate– Smoke curls skyward–

*

And darkness corked by light. In this night scene the first bridge, built out of the first man’s mouth, makes the world make sense. One theory says God fell in love and in letting go: matter. Between death and dream breath’s vanishing, the broken parts, bring us back to each other– erasures, secco-frescoed molecules– malachite, ultramarine, lead tin yellow, flaking with time, vine black triangles where a branch once held the tree trembling in place.

JOANNA GOODMAN