- Presents The 2025 Ted Plantos Memorial Award Winner -
Charlotte Blair
At first reading, I was struck by the formal variety of Charlotte Blair's poetry. Her work ranges over a number of
poetic forms, including couplets, quatrains, concrete verse, traditional single stanza lyrics, even bravely venturing
into the writing of a villanelle, one of the most challenging accomplishments for any poet. Blair repeats the line
"me and my sister drunk, comparing tats," at one point rhyming 'tats' with 'muskrats'. Mature of content, style,
formal mastery, and with just enough storytelling these poems confirm her as being a more than worthy recipient of
the Ted Plantos Award.
John B. Lee
Poet Laureate of the city of Brantford, Norfolk County and Canada Cuba Literary Alliance
| Poems by Charlotte Blair |
|
It Depends on How You Look at It
Remembering always to breathe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See, there were five of us in the back seat, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From Where We Sprung ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How Not to Introduce Myself to His Family ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- yet one thing serves to cool my thirsty ghost - me and my sister drunk, comparing tats. I gave him several thousand in advance thinking to take him seven days at most - it's hard to measure foreboding in facts. He disappeared from mutual contacts my money gone, naught to do but toast - me and my sister drunk, comparing tats. If he'd been first to lie to me, perhaps I'd understand how I'd let instinct coast - It's hard to measure foreboding in facts. We blunder through this world, lit acrobats our hopes for requite compassion topmost - My and my sister drunk, comparing tats. Our kayaks glide beside wizened muskrats we'll spend our afternoon wildlife engrossed - it's hard to measure foreboding in facts. Me and my sister drunk, comparing tats. Can't Buy That Harley Now first appeared in Arboreal Literary Magazine, No. 1, February, 2023 |
It Must Have Been the Apple
The purifiers pair before they fall: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If we met it would be by chance -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You remember the ranch and the formidable, flowing foothills dotted by You Moved a Long Way Away But it Stuck first appeared in Askew's Word on the Lake Writing Contest Anthology, 2025 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the foot pegs on my mini bike pushing my knees up level with my baseball breasts. I rode for miles that day, sometimes in the ditches with the grass and wild roses biting my shins, sometimes on the gravel that shot up behind me, bullets of blossoming independence perforating the dust of looming memories. yet all that freedom blew away on the wind the moment my bike died the engine froze, the tires slowed, quiet landed. there was nothing to be seen but fields still too short to cut, yet across the prairie I recognized a herd of cattle meditating in the sun. I pulled my tube top up, my shorts legs down, and started down the silent road, the closest place a dusty ranch belonging to my brother's friend. There were two houses on that land - one had been his grandfather's, the other he lived in with his parents and childlike sister - when she was old enough to vote the government tied her tubes, taking away the one thing she always wanted to accomplish in her life. Sadness lay on her like paint. She wasn't home that day, neither were the parents just him - lithe and funny, thick-haired and muscular, with the easy familiarity of boy-man growing into the generations of ranching that stretched out on either side of him - his fence against mortality. He asked if I'd ever been inside his grandfather's shuttered house, led me in like we were going somewhere cozy for a chat, but it was full of old furniture, lamps and placemats and dust, no place to sit. Still, somehow behind a box of doilies and a stuffed wild boar he found a neat bed, sheets crisp, pillows cased. I sat on the bed as invited, later lay lamblike in his arms as he lowered me through my trust and onto my back, my top sliding under my breasts my breasts under his hands his hands under my shorts, there was no time to consider my response, the weight of his want flattened my fantasy, I didn't feel cherished, or liked, even, just necessary with so much to think about, my eyes sought escape and settled on the glint of the hog's glass globes, his tatty tusks teasing me I had trusted too easily. 40 years and thousands of kilometers later, still nothing discourages me like the smell of warm breath, cinnamon gum and beer. |
