Anne Silver Award

Charlotte Innes recently had a poem selected for the Best American Spiritual Writing for 2006 (Houghton Mifflin)She has work forthcoming in Sewanee Review and The Eleventh Muse. She has also published poetry in The Hudson Review, Ekphrasis, and Speechless. Her awards include an Honorable Mention in a poetry contest sponsored by The Eleventh Muse (2007), and a First Prize in the Poetry in the Windows V contest (2003) in Los Angeles. She also writes about books and the arts for many publications, including The Los Angeles Times and The Nation. Four of her Nation reviews have been anthologized in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Currently, she teaches English, journalism and creative writing at Brentwood School, Los Angeles.

Benefactor Joel Warren donated the $67 prize, a sum Speechless settled on because it provides two cheap dinners, two movie tickets and a little gas money.

Charlotte Innes

From the MORE MOON THAN MOON series*

More Moon than Moon (T)

The moon in Theresienstadt was no different
from this one. Children painted (there’s a book about it),
women discussed recipes, and fine musicians played
and composed music later heard in U.S. cities.

On May 8, nineteen-forty-five, Liberation Day,
Bernhard Einzig, my grandfather, died in that damned place.
Was it morning or night? Was the moon out? Did he know?
Was he feverish with typhus? Did he say, “Today,

Englishmen, whom I admire, have come to this Hades,
my spirit can soar freely.” (It was the Red Army.)
This week, sixty-one years later, in a feverish
rush, I’ve written seven poems. Where do they come from?

And now it’s May 8. I read the paper, feed my cats,
see in the bathroom mirror that my hair needs trimming.
After dinner, I walk by three cherry trees in bloom.
The moon lies hidden by clouds, yellowish, grey as ash.

Entry Rules: The Anne Silver Award, commemorating the late Los Angeles poet, acknowledges witty poems in form. Any type of formal poem may be submitted. There is no readers' fee. Email entries to the Editor. Deadline is November 1, 2007. Judge will be Larry Colker.

Charles Harper Webb's book Amplified Dog won the Saltman Prize for Poetry and was published in 2006 by Red Hen Press. His book of prose poems, Hot Popsicles, was published in 2005 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, he directs Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach. He was once paid $500 to think up horrific and inventive ways for people to die in Friday the Thirteenth; he forgets which number.