Anne Silver Award

Robert Mezey's awards include The Lamont Poetry Award, for The Lovemaker, a PEN prize, and a Bassine citation for Evening Wind. His new book of poems, To the Gathering Vacancy, will be published by the North Dakota Institute Press. From 1976 to 2002 he was professor and poet-in-residence at Pomona College. He was Visiting Professor at Kenyon in 2010. He has edited ten books including Poems of the American West (Knopf, Everyman) and Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics.

The Anne Silver Award commemorates the late Los Angeles poet, acknowledges witty poems in form. This issue's contest was judged by Larry Colker. 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.

Robert Mezey

Please?

If I swung through the jungle on a vine
And beat my chest, impatient to entwine,
Or else came on more civilized, more benign,
And knelt down at your feet or lay supine,
Making vague gestures, an ambiguous sign
Towards the general area of your shrine,
As if suggesting that you too recline,
Or even if I, by accident or design,
Let slip that love is but an anodyne,
A temporary balm, however fine,
Yes, even if I should all love resign
And let my hair grow long and swear off wine
And never write another goddamn line,
Darling, wouldn't you be my Valentine?