Judged by Kathleen Rooney - Founder of Rose Metal Press

Gold: Rosanne Tolin

“Here Lies” ~ just 133 words, this prose poem is elegiac and strange, funny and sad. Set in a cemetery after the death of the author’s mother, it captures the absurd and bereft feeling of grief and mourning. - Kathleen Rooney

Shalom Cemetery in the valley of the shadow, you in your soaking Doc Martens. Rabbi Katz says your mother had good taste. In rabbis? Howling headstones mushroom and you can’t hear the rest. Scent of decaying leaves. She despised the Midwest winter. Wind WHOOSH sends wads of Kleenex, spiraling skyward. She’ll be buried right here. You swear-to-God she would hate her own eulogy. God too. One by one, they toss dirt on her casket. Velvet skullcaps on their heads, their tarnished Stars of David hover. Your mother’s voice rises. If you want something done, you do it yourself. Your mother’s voice rises. Forgive me for bailing. You wander unmarked graves: no names or dates. Glow worms burrow in clay muck, you can’t know the grief of ghosts. Where they hide their white teeth.

Silver: Jackie Craven

“My Unborn Child Lives in a Halfway House” ~ just 109 words long, this prose poem is weird and urgent, using vivid imagery, figurative language, and repetition to evoke a dreamlike state that feels both real and unreal simultaneously as a kind of pre-ghost haunts the speaker. - Kathleen Rooney

Her hair is blue and her eyes are moons. “You’re too beautiful,” I say, “to live in only half a house,” and she leaps into my car, thumps her palms on the dashboard, and cries, “Hurry!” We hurry to the cottage she made from playdough. She touches the drowsy gray sofa, the Formica table, the tea kettle with the chipped smile. She circles again, touches each dusty memory again, and I worry. What will you eat?” Her refrigerator smells of dead mice. My birth year is stamped on the milk carton. My unborn child sloshes milk into the cup of her hand. “It’s good,” she says. “It’s still good.”

Bronze: Judy Friedman

“Jigsaw” ~ deceptively simple, this 260-word prose poem shows the way that even every day tools and objects can seem strange and full of life in the eyes of a child. - Kathleen Rooney

When I grew tall enough, I met the jigsaw, the smallest machine on the block of my father’s basement workshop cave. With its narrow frame and unfinished wooden legs, the jigsaw was the runt alongside a muscular circular saw; a looming, lateral, lavish lathe; and a workhorse workbench with a pegboard wall of awls and screwdrivers, honeycomb boxes of nuts and bolts, bolted vices, pliers, paintbrushes, slide rules and tools that ruled the wooden world my father made.

And now he was willing to share a piece of it with me. Eager to get to know the rig, I noticed first its beaming jagged teeth that seemed to smile at its secret power: the ability to chew through layers of grain. Up, down, up, down so fast, it formed a fuzzy blur. I had watched its singular singing blade blaze a single line through the hardest hopes. And now I was ready to cut my own teeth on the edges of creation and imagination.

The flip of a fickle switch toggled my being from off to on and into a focused state of elation. My father taught me the jigsaw’s jam of rounding curves and defining details, cutting pretty ruts and rows, rivulets of dreams that were my own design, feeding into rivers of dust drifting down and piling up, lending to my growing up. I made my little hands look big with my fingers splayed and my elbows wide, pushing hard on the slippery plate that fed a simple scrap of wood into the teeth that turned it beautiful.

Gold: The Solihull Maidens ~ Andrew Baker

An erudite comic story about gambling nuns, this author humorously and illuminatingly examines the connection and the contrast between religious ecstasy and more earthly thrills. ~ Kathleen Rooney

There hadn’t been interest at first. But once rhythm was established — each Monday for the settling, then planning the succeeding week — the nuns at Solihull Convent became enamoured of the pool. The challenge was keeping their enthusiasm bridled. Giggles during a natter could be fatal. Even if the stakes were but scones, jam, and clotted cream brought by another, they could not divine how hegumenia would feel about betting on football. Then Sister Iona said, “If God knoweth all, so shall Mother know a little less.” Her scribble launching it she borrowed from a postcard: an illuminated manuscript of Exodus.

Hic post sext lacunae incipit was Sister Iona’s rude conjuring, the word unearthing animal coupling buried in the noon Hour adjacent to code suggesting sybaritic baths of Ancient Rome, strygils raking oiled flesh, prefaced with the gravid phrase: Here begins. The schedule for Solihull Moors included Nailsworth, Maidenhead, Gateshead, and Tamworth at the Lamb. The welter of implication was delicious. The women were mutely exuberant — surely a state only nuns can attain. A magical feeling, joy in a joke shared with a chosen few under the arch of God’s firmament, intercession by way of humor, accompanied by a high-throated hum.

The third Monday after Lent it unravelled. As a girl in Poland, Sister Yenufa had played football with boys. She sheltered throughout life misgivings about Her virginity. She placed in her pool a week’s worth of shortbread for Maidenhead’s triumph. The women gathered round the radio to tally scores. “Moors 1 Maidenhead nil” elicited an ironic guffaw from the belly of Sister Yenufa. Vindicated! “Lest to Gateshead I come,” she whispered, “Nailsworth my wrists. No Maidenhead She.” “Apostasy!” cried Sister Iona, slamming shut the book. As the women would greet a pregnancy, their shared sin brought nought but thrilling shame.

Andrew Baker, Ph.D is a professional writer, editor, and coach; he writes fiction, poetry, and essays. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Northwestern, taught drama, poetry, writing and performance at Northwestern and Loyola, directed theatre in Chicago, and assistant-directed at Lyric Opera of Chicago and Dallas Opera. For 25+ years he ran a communications agency serving professional firms. He is past Chair of the Writing Society at the University Club of Chicago.

An impressively concise story about going to see the Greatest Show on Earth in the 1960s near the Union Stockyards, this piece captures the losses that accompany the passage of time, and how almost everything can disappear except for the tiniest souvenir and a few memories. ~ Kathleen Rooney

Circus Marvel ~ Judy Friedman

The sky was heavy with the stench of cattle that for years had been slaughtered at Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. Oblivious to this gruesome past, I stood with my family in the 1960s, waiting at the adjacent International Amphitheatre to behold “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Unlike the lot of the neighboring livestock, animals here had been repurposed and rendered for human entertainment. Like folks piling into a tiny car, we were throngs of an eager audience awaiting a feast of acrobatic elephants, horses in headdresses, tethered lions and tigers—all taunted by the antics of prank-pulling clowns.

The show inside was surely a spectacle, but the wonder outside is the story I remember. We were there, in the first place, probably because of my mom Maxine’s fun-loving spirit. Her curiosity for culture widened our eyes to pursuits like puppets, plays, and circus shows. Now we were here to see Lou Jacobs and the storied smile of the world’s most famous clown. But as we stood in line, I wasn’t smiling. I was a small, impatient six-year-old surrounded by imposing woolen coats and a stained sky that weighed on my senses.

As my legs grew heavy, an older man distracted me, his almond-shaped eyes crossing cultures to understand. He offered me an Asian lucky charm: a bunch of tiny, white plastic grapes with a pair of dice on purple, braided floss. I clutched the charm in my little fist and held it tight for the next 60 years. Today, the Union Stock Yards have long disappeared (though perhaps its ghosts still linger there). So is the Amphitheatre and its dusty floors gone, circus laughter suspended in the clouds. Even Maxine is absent from the ring. Only my lucky charm still amazes.

In 40+ years of professional writing, Judith Stern Friedman has been widely published in national magazines and books, including more than a dozen Better Homes & Gardens special-interest titles. As a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant, Judy wrote countless successful PR/Advertising campaigns, many of which have won sales and marketing awards. As adjunct faculty in DePaul University’s College of Communication, she fine-tuned face-to-face and online renditions of the college’s core writing course. She also conceived and created an online grammar and punctuation program called Grammantics.

Judy’s more recent poetry and prose have been published in Highland Park’s East on Central and Highland Park Poetry’s anthologies, including Pushcart Prize nominations. Her flash non-fiction piece, “A Favor for a Friend,” also won an OCWW prize from Rose Metal Press.

A simple yet strange story about the slippage of time. As the narrator experiences the gaps between present-day Chicago and its distant past the reader is reminded that there was always something happening before we arrived ~ Kathleen Rooney

Journey From Wabash Street, Chicago ~ Jocelyn Ajami

I walk towards what might have been. Glossy marble leads me out of the lobby into a blaze of fractured light. Shadows hover as the rails rumble. I take a right on Wabash, sounding like splash of dreams. I stroll north towards the silver river, moist grass beneath my feet. The prairie expands around me in strokes of sepia and gold. I stretch my arms to boisterous chirping. A band of honey-faced elk shuffle across the field. They graze until a shriek of sirens startles them into a run. Before I can catch my breath, they fade into stone walls.

Disoriented, I pass jewelry stores and eateries, resisting a sudden craving for coriander and falafel. From a distance, a surging glass tower commands the sky. Giant letters hug its girth like a cheap T-shirt wrapping its vulgarity around the sublime. When the fog consumes it, my pace quickens towards the horizon. I skirt past the specter of Fort Dearborn on Wacker Drive, hearing echoes of the Three Council Fires. Loud buzzing and a pungent scent of leeks mixed with mud overwhelms my senses. The river emerges more crowded than Michigan Avenue at rush hour, a kaleidoscope of commerce and clatter.

Boats line the river brimming with beaver, muskrat and bear pelts; baskets of corn, rice and tobacco. Hunters, adventurers and merchants trade in a crossfire of shouts, punctuated by generous laughter. A Potowatomi child waves hello, signaling for me to join in. Her dark hair and citrus green eyes accentuate an unvarnished smile. She asks me why I look so puzzled. I don’t know how to respond. As I ponder which dimension to claim, she takes my hand, then nudges me into a birchbark canoe. Together we paddle through the bustling traffic of Checagou, pointing at longhouses made of sun.

Reprinted with permission from Cloudbank19

Jocelyn Ajami is a painter, filmmaker and poet. As an artist with a global perspective, she turned to writing in 2014 as a way of connecting more intimately with issues of social conscience and cultural awareness. She has been published in many anthologies of prize winning poems and has been nominated for Touchstone and Pushcart awards. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, she lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.