The Results of the 2014 Editor's Choice Contest are in!!!

And the Winner is . . .

Scavenger Hunt by Donna Barkman


2nd place goes to . . .

Visitation Tuesday by Denise Weuve


3rd place goes to . . .

Mathematics by Christopher Hivner


This year we had three Honorable Mentions.  They are . . .

The Traffic in Old Ladies by Mary Newell
this small rain by Alexis Rhone Fancher
Signs of the Apolcalypse by Terri Simon


To read the winning poems and to see the complete list of finalists go to Kind of a Hurricane's Editor's Choice Contest Site:  http://editorschoiceaward.blogspot.com/ 

A Poem by B.T. Joy

If I Close My Eyes I See White Gibbons

So now I'm a human being in the 21st century:
a strange, wild animal in a three-piece suit.

When I was  home we discussed Genghis Khan over wine,
how he couldn't give up women even for the monk

whose eyes were pink as the white rabbit's pounding
elixirs of life on the face of the moon.

Part of me remembers water and green growing things.
A shine on the pond where, wet with darkness, caimans slink,

as illiterate as a stone we glided down, hand
over hand, through a history of leaves.

Still now and again you catch it staring upward:
your gibbon-soul, grown tired of time.

Ready to ascend on the directest road it knows:
to drop the ground like a bad idea.

B.T. Joy is a British poet, short fiction writer and educator who is currently teaching English at high school level in Heilongjiang, China.  His poetry and prose has appeared in journals, magazines, anthologies, and podcasts worldwide including Uut Poetry, Yuan Yang, The Meadow, Toasted Cheese, Presence, Paper Wasp, Bottle Rockets, Mu, Frogpond, and The Newtowner, among many others.  He can be contacted through his website, B.T. Joy Poetry Online (http://btj0005uk.wix.com/btjoypoet) and he regurlarly posts both poetry and visual artwork on his tumblr blog, Turning To Visuals (http://btj0005uk.tumblr.com/)

Three Poems by A.J. Huffman

Life’s [Lack of] Revision

I close my eyes and wish my life

away.  I open them to find I have grown

white and tired as expected, but never gathered

by wind, whisked away in attempted regeneration. 

I am repulsive

weed, waiting for maintenance

blade to make me modern

Marie Antoinette.   

Midnight Butterfly

I bloom at stroke 12 in shapes

            of tears and torture.

Twisting through hours

human eyes should never see.  Me,

I breathe their suffocating

tick.

          Tock, the language

of the forgotten, follows my lips’

lead.  Under

rainbow roads, into the deep

                                               er brush.  The moon‘s

current nightmaring across the sky.

The Road to Conversation Road

should be two sided,

                                                though often is dominated

                                                by the side that believes

                                                it is right.

gets bumpy, is often

convoluted, disrupted

by irrelevant tangents.

                                                is an uphill journey, where

                                                minds and tires spin in place,

                                                get stuck

in redundancies thicker

than mud.

                                                is of the greatest intrinsic value

though, sadly, often ends

without solidified

point.

A.J. Huffman has published eleven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  Her new poetry collection, Another Blood Jet, is now available from Eldritch Press.  She has two more poetry collections forthcoming:  A Few Bullets Short of Home, from mgv2>publishing and Degeneration, from Pink. Girl. Ink.  She is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, and has published over 2100 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com  

Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Out Of Body Moment

My television is my only touch point with the world

Ablaze with visions all night like a mother’s heartbeat
And as I rest my ear upon her large and ample breasts
It offers warmth and comfort as it glows with a fleshly light
A cookie jar full of visions that pound with the sureness of ocean tides.
 
 

An Injection Of Solace

Sacrilegious winter is trapped upon alpine spider webs

Made of sleep deprived velvet
That is as devastating as Beethoven
In its deteriorating lament that shimmers across
The extension of the sand dunes
Leaving behind a pattern of dulcimers
That are bestowed upon us like snow flakes
Even as all of tonight becomes a labyrinth
Of worship that unbuttons like a game of chess
The red pill or the blue pill
What does it really matter
As all falls into beautiful slices
Of the tell tale rememberer
That rise up like wood smoke
And almost become a ballet as it leaves
Vanishing into November
With a soft sigh that is gently heaved.

 

Paper Dolls, Bologna Sandwiches And The Sound Of Rain

The delicacies of night are in the process of vanishing

As I scribble mantras in this ant colony that is on the edge of blurring
Sometimes we are lovers sometimes shipwrecks
Up until dawn listening to Zeppelin, The Who and The Stones’ sultry old firecrackers
On the original scratched vinyl that still has the power
To make the starlight’s colors jump in bundles in this city that has no last name.




For the past thirty-five years Ken L. Jones has been a professionally published author who has done everything from writing Donald Duck Comic books to creating things for Freddy Krueger to say in some of his movies.  In the last six years he has concentrated on his lifelong ambition of becoming a published poet and he has published widely in all genres of that discipline in books, online, in chapbooks and in several solo collections of poetry.  


 

A Poem by Michael H. Brownstein

4 AM

1.

Almost a day before I have to go to work.
Where will I be in the realm of quiet?
You know and you know and you know.

2.

4 AM: We did not hear the warning sirens.

5 AM: We did not hear the all clear.

6 AM: We did not hear.

7 AM  7 AM 7 AM 7 AM 7 AM

and three hours later,
the great walnut in the yard
broke itself from its bones, leaned
heavily into the building to the left.
The old barn was gone.

3.

The foundation cracked into brickwork.
The foundation cracked into summary.

4.

Three months earlier
the wind
no longer knew the way
home.



Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published.  His latest works, Firestorm:  A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Books on Blogs) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100F Outside and other poems (Barometric Pressures -- A Kind of a Hurricane Press).  His work has appeared in The Cafe Review, American Letters and Commentary, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, and others.  In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005) and I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011).  He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

A Poem by John W. Sexton

Wheezing an Ecstasy

another ossified cloud
shatters
China Town

          forelocked shut . . .
          the hundred-headed
          circular horse

wheezing an ecstasy . . .
the astronauts survey
an angel's flake of dust

          annihilated all that's made . . .
          they rest
          in existential beige

a soft knock of the hammer?
. . . inside the apricot
a strange gnarled house

          dropped a knife
          in the Nolichucky . . .
          the hills limp to a stop

John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent being The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon Poetry, 2013).  He also created and wrote The Ivory Tower for RTE radio, which ran to over one hundred half-hour episodes from 1999 to 2002.  Two novels based on the characters from this series have been published by the O'Brien Press:  The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed, which have been translated into both Italian and Serbian.  He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem "The Green Owl" won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007.  Also in 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.

Three Poems by Kelley White

5 degree day

This boy in red shorts asks why the word genitals is always plural.  Has an angry scar on his back that he says is a razor cut when he was five years old and there are five children 14 13 12 11 10 8.  He is the twelve.  There are also burns.  Three.  He says a friend made them with a lighter.  One is shaped like a capital letter A.  I am still.  Coughing.  It is drowning stuff.  As a doctor and I am not popular.  How can I be so wrong?  Strong.  Never enough money.  I spend on toys and a bear.  Toy car.  Against scars.  How can I be a mother?  I resent everyone.  Those who show up and those who don't.  I think I am so good and I think I am so bad.  The boy wants a dog.  Perhaps a cat.  I am not fitting even to have a dog or a cat.  I can write a letter.  Therapy dog.  Oh snow.  Snowbanks cold.  I slip on ice.  Bleeding.  Outside the office.  Toy car.

5:38

All those dolls.  Toys.  Bears.  Huge debt.  And 60 pounds up.  No time to clean the house or walk.  Eating.  Everything costs money.  Flying.  Go.  I'd like to dip into what my mother has in that little victory account or trump or triumph account, whatever it's called but I don't want her to know that I've come to this.  I can't buy an acre of sheep for 10,000 or 1000.  I'd like to give to charity but it hasn't made me popular.  I can't afford to have somebody clean my house.  I am sorry to be so close to anger.  You.  I cannot help but see this as about the boy and not about your grandmother or me.  And about that man.  Him.  Me.  How spoiled you are.  How spoiled I am.  How angry I am that I spoiled you.  How angry I am that I am not the one who spoiled you.  How angry I am that I spoiled myself.  Oh.  That insurance policy.  Do I cash in that?  Be a pauper after death?

Analgesia

It will be herbs not bees.  The bees have to wait.  And I am fond of them.  But afraid.  Afraid of stoning that even now gives me that shiver that itching buzz.  I got frustrated with a girl today and all of it really the way her sister plucked at the walls pealed my stickiest my sticker wall decor.  Your son wants to know about this pile pied piper man and if he comes to Philadelphia.  Sell.  Why not.  New Hampshire.  Has my son seen pumping iron.  I saw that.  With Alex in the old theater that showed movies with a pipe organ playing.  But I don't Hank.  That went with the body builders.  Bills and pills theft was there was something gay perhaps about that.  I certainly did not find Arnold that attractive but and he did marry a Kennedy and I remembered those edgy gray gay body building magazines and soft porn and gun magazines I found babysitting behind the clean sheets and now my mother thinks that man is dying a few months after his wife who he treated badly and gave her love in the lateness of a marriage and does someone I won't name take care of me.  One couldn't shouldn't say but I told him son what you said after heaven has Heather has two.  Two mommies and he is.  Well he's an old man afraid of rape.  Odd to take him to a colonoscopy and they give sedation and they give sedation and amnesia analgesia.  Oh I do not like that idea.  A drug to forget the pain.  That humilation.  I did not have colonoscopy.  It was a barium enema.  And oh my father oh my son my son my son.  Are you?  Are you well?  Herbs not bees.

Pediatrician Kelley White worked in inner city Philadelphia and now works in rural New Hampshire.  Her poems have appeared in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA.  Her most recent books are Toxic Environment (Boston Poet Press) and Two Birds in Flame (Beech River Books).  She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.