Three Prairie Schooner Edward Stanley Award-Winning Poems — Nance Van Winckel

Last month Prairie Schooner announced its annual literary awards, and Nance Van Winckel, who has already appeared on the pages of Numéro Cinq several times for her poetry, video art, photocollages and off the page pho-toems, won the Edward Stanley Award for nine poems that appeared in the magazine’s summer issue. It’s a huge pleasure to offer here three of the prize-winning poems. Nance is one of my favourite co-workshop-leaders at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a hip lady with a wry sense of humour and knowing grace. —dg

 

Three Edward Stanley Award-Winning Poems

By Nance Van Winckel

 

You Might Remember Her From Earlier

Sawing into my September mind, one step
and I’m on the crowded path, shoving
toward the vortex. Information in the place
of grief. Trafficking in it. The shirt had
a name, but the man didn’t. Girl, that’s
one lousy anti-Lazarusian report.

The boss wants newer news. Scrubbed
news. In fewer picas. Enter the underground,
pass through the turnstile, everyone trying
to say they told me so. Part of a horde
on pause in a train, I sat under my book’s
black awning. How I loved those cold mornings
of the early pages—turning up
the marble hallways of the vast B.C.

 

Negotiable Instruments

Work For Food, his sign says, so we
put him in our truck & truck him
to the building, condemned, & give him
a sledgehammer & a ham-on-rye & ditto
the same unto ourselves whose butt tattoos
read Work Will Make Us Free & we three
fall upon the struts & joists, we beat back
& swing low, we dig out & haul ass
so rubble is again as it’s always been
the rule of the world, until he whom
we carried with us we may carry away
& refeed and high five & bid adieu so he
may turn his sign at last to the flipside
that tells us to Have a Blessed Day.

 

The Red Line

The Mommy says her Little Man eats, page

by page, whatever romance she’s reading.

Eats headlines and bugs from the yard.

The train rattles around us

and every time the doors blow apart, Little Man leans

to lick the breeze. He leaves no unturned stone

uneaten. Everything’s fire-roasted, taste-

tested. What amplification

he gives space when his mouth opens. He may be

one part per trillion of the world,

but he plans to ingest the other

999.9 billion. He has

the stomach for it, for all us scarfed and hatted,

stuck in a paragraph of dashed hopes.

As the stops yank us in or push

us out, he sees me and nibbles

at my grudge. Little cloud in Little Man’s eye

is all that finally puts him to sleep,

and sleep on him is just too terrible

a beauty to behold. For even

asleep, Little Man punches the Mommy’s breast,

sure it’ll never empty, sure

he’ll always stay a bee

upon the white flower.

—Nance Van Winckel

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