Many thanks to all who entered the inaugural competition, and to George Szirtes for adjudicating. The winner was Lisa D'Onofrio with "Local Regeneration". Yvonne Blomer's "There's No Word For Husband" was highly commended. 

Local Regeneration

by Lisa D'Onofrio

She cannot say she suspected
her thoughts were on double-glazing and clothes lines
the only pang
of something not being quite right was her forgetting to defrost the mince.
She admitted these things –
they had been a choice, of sorts.

Casting back she recalls
placing a marble under her mattress
swearing she could feel it’s smooth hardness
proving she was a Princes
and destined for Other Things.

Slicing her thumb
cutting the crusts off jam sandwiches
she imagines whorls of flesh
dairy whipped into bloody peaks.

Hands rooted in the sink
looking out her window at the familiar yellow field
clusters of words blister and rearrange –
the brutality of her new vocabulary shocks her.

She is squashed between boards,
her body re-experiencing the tingle of development
the soreness of a future emerging, inevitable and unstoppable.

She once wished for detachable ones
that flew above her, attached to her chest by a silver cord.
Now one hovers, just beyond her line of vision, a fluttery phantom
and she doesn’t know if the other one
its’ slightly bigger twin having been licked by it
weeps in pain or sympathy or relief.
She keeps these thoughts contained

and remembers Autumn and the smell of burning barley
all that wicked heat provoking
germination, tough and tender.

She knows her body holds memories
rocks them to sleep and stores them away.
She pictures her skeleton beneath her flesh
bright and hard and perfect.

There’s no word for husband
by Yvonne Blomer

Today the wind blows dry leaves into piles,
sends birds rushing from trees, while the sun
lights branches that bow into shadow. It took months
before my tongue could shape the word husband. This is
Rupert, I’d say or this is my this person. In Japanese
I never learned the word for husband, instead lowered my head
to the custom of distance – ano hito – that person, kono, this
dance has a long beginning where man and woman press
words into each other’s ears, hands together, bodies held
back, a kind of withholding of self. Time
allows for the shaping of language – I left
able to carry conversations, to translate, say
kono, ano, sono and mean:
this word on my lips is a name, that name is a song,
that song over there likes to hear its name held firmly,
sweet and heavy as a rice ball on my tongue; secrets
held in the folds of language, in the root
of what we bear and master between us.