Views on whether a Pushcart Prize nomination is anything to feel good about range from it being meaningless (after all, some 10,000 nominations are made by small publishers annually) to it being an important acknowledgement that at least one publisher has included your work in their best six for the year. It’s no surprise that I’m going for the latter. 😉

Rat’s Ass Review (isn’t that a delightful title) has put forward a poem of mine they published in their Fall/Winter edition this year. It’s called Christmas Presence and it goes like this:

Christmas presence

Whatever the generations bring
to this collective presence,
there will be totems of the past
fixed firmly insistent in each of our minds,
arrayed with faces carved in the hard woods
that only family trees produce
and set, sometimes poles apart, in the family grove.
Children growing themselves from new numbers each year,
all named and loved and parented in common for a day
with tear-filled eyes, chocolate-coated faces and grinny cheeks,
each hoisted to embrace and admiration,
all feats applauded and all false pride mocked.
Food, prepared as sanctioned by time,
in unspoken, ordained ritual by the women,
the bearers of all sustaining life.
 
Men, surrounded by seemingly unobservant boys,
using beer to shorten stretching distances,
quietly competing every hurdle
until a child clings to a leg
and wins.
Lives past, sitting patiently in reserved and sacred chairs,
coming back to life in anecdotes
of bastardry and joy.
Toddlers and crawlers, excited and bewildered,
knee-deep in wrapping paper and parental nostalgia.
Babes at breast, absorbing every nuance
through the pores of their clan skin
and the memories encoded in their mother’s milk.
 
The married-ins, belonging in their separateness
to this caravan, as hopeful and as helpless
as those that followed a certain star
but at least knowing for whom they bear their gifts.
 
And, amidst all, the matriarch unfolds a pattern
and, with skills both ancient and subtle,
draws to her strands unknitted,
in case they ever unravel
and pull the fabric apart.