Send us your poegles!  The May 2009 Poegles Challenge is open until noon EST on May 31st, 2009.  Please email your poegles to editor@poegles.com. 

The best poegles will be placed on the website and shared in our newsletter.  Please include your name and the search phrase that you used to generate your poegle.

April winner: Polly in the Blue Ridge for Synchronicity

March winner: Judith in the North for Don’t Flash That Light Anymore, Honey

February winner: Jamie in Brooklyn for At the Edge of the Park.  

January winner: Julie in DC for You Are Entering.  

View the submissions archive.

Want to get in on the action?  Each month award $100 to a poegler for the best crafted poegle.  We accept poegles of any length and in any form, provided that they are in English.  In order to be entered to win, poeglers must register for the Poegles.com newsletter, and provide us with copy by noon EST on the date of the contest deadline.  Poeglers must also supply the search phrase they used to generate the poegle, as well as a mailing address to which the cash award can be sent.  Participants grant to Poegles.com rights to publish their poegles, per our terms.

Send us your poegles!  The April 2009 Poegles Challenge is open until noon EST on April 30th, 2009.  Please email your poegles to editor@poegles.com. 

The best poegles will be placed on the website and shared in our newsletter.  Please include your name and the search phrase that you used to generate your poegle.

March winner: Judith in the North for Don’t Flash That Light Anymore, Honey

February winner: Jamie in Brooklyn for At the Edge of the Park.  

January winner: Julie in DC for You Are Entering.  

Here’s this months’ winning poegle:

Don’t Flash That Light Anymore, Honey

To Peter Scowen

Let’s break out the world’s tiniest violin, play the world’s saddest song,
and find you have known of freedom’s glory; shake me again and wake me
from this frozen slumber with technique to burn. Look at you, Fleeting Star!

The world ain’t a ghetto. The Lady’s Burning Man-issued name is “Sublimity,”
after the tiny mountain unto the flash-frozen cool of wiseass byplay
and the catgut ecstasies burning against her through her . . .

A burning building, people trapped inside. She saw the clean. Sun flash
the open clasp for flash revolution as cities burn, from first to last, Saintly Stone …
Hellions throwing fuel on the fire, laughing, “They are just some pieces

of flash fiction that I scrap most of the times and forget it rained burning
needles in the dark.” Have you heard the frozen seas on the dark unpainted night?
Burning so restless within me. Within you. Making us one, frozen tears

and dead promises. Without your light . . . An ear-splitting roar issues, meets
with an accidental death, while string pearls and light cuts through your head.
You search for clarity, cannot find frozen winter shift laughing at weakness.

Be like a cottage on a moor, a covert from the wind, burning fire and open door;
they laugh and flash, and leap and spire; and, toss ten thousand suns.
The earth is dark, with frozen eyes, a flash of teeth, white-folded in her shroud.

Judith from Canada (search phrase: “flash frozen” + “burning violin”, ignorning results related to “Dance Me To The End Of Love”)

Send us your poegles!  The March 2009 Poegles Challenge is open until noon EST on March 31st, 2009.  Please email your poegles to editor@poegles.com. 

The best poegles will be placed on the website and shared in our newsletter.  Please include your name and the search phrase that you used to generate your poegle.

Last month’s winner: Jamie in Brooklyn for At the Edge of the Park.  Check it out!

January’s winner: Julie in DC for You Are Entering.  

Two ‘requests for poetry’ (RFP’s) that she points to:

Poems inspired by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

The Asahi Haikuist Network

We recommend poegles for both.

With Thanksgiving behind us and the Main Event of the holiday season fast approaching, we bid adieu, if you will pardon our French, to the poegle week that was, and ring in a new week of poegles with warm wishes and good cheer.  And three cheers to Bob in Pennsylvania, the winner of this week’s Friday Poegle Contest for his stellar poegle The Woods Behind Our House.  Bob, your plastic segmented jump rope is on the way.

Counterintuitive to the holiday season, this week’s theme for the Friday Poegle Contest is:  “The Devil.”  Since The Devil’s poetry peak in Paradise Lost, you could say that it is has been all downhill, but we are confident that poeglers can give this subject the thought and care that it clearly deserves.  Possible search phrases include “the devil you know,” “idle hands,” and “a little voice told me.”

That handsome devil you see on Poegles.com is Justin as he wraps up week three of Mustaches for Kids and closes in on his goal of raising $1500 for poetry programs in underfunded elementary schools.  Just a few more generous poeglers could help Justin reach his goal.

Some of you may also have seen our very own editor sharing his analysis of the slumping economy’s effect upon holiday travel on Fox Five News last week.  Here at Poegles, we don’t confine our efforts to the arts.  We believe that art can only be made by participating in the sturm und drang of modern life.  Enjoy.

Happy poegling.  See you next week.

The Editors

The Woods Behind Our House

My sister and I liked to explore.
We regularly saw buzzards,
A pregnant coyote,
Squirrels gathering acorns.

There were three big black cats
In our broken down tree house.
Outside, old toys and dolls
Buried underneath the leaves.

On cold nights after mother was gone,
We crawled under barbed wire fences
And through the brambles. I remember
Drops of blood on my sister’s nightgown.

When I was little, I had a vision
Of a tribe of insulted raccoons,
Witches and mischievous spirits,
Trees with magical powers.

My arms became limbs, my fingers leaves.

- Bob in Pennsylvania (search phrase: “the woods behind our house”)

We Made a Fort

Out of chairs and blankets.
Out of pillows and mats.
Under the neighbor’s back deck.

Out of sticks and palm tree leaves
On the beach. With logs on the beach.
With the comforter, and then
There was more bouncing.

In the hallway of our dorm one night.
In the snow to get ready for
A snowball fight. Of sunflowers.

In Sam’s Club, and we threw
Paper towels at people. Out of sheets
And we played with our toys in there.

With cushions. Using the kitchen table.
(A decent fort should fit four children
And one adult comfortably.)

Out of a blanket and some cord
For my nephew to play in
While we were cooking. With my dad
In the trees behind my house.

Under the jungle gym, and you needed
A password to come in. With the box
And I had so much fun playing in it.

Out of a hole in the ground, and it had
A pink toilet seat for a trap door.
Out of twigs and pine needles.

With a bunch of stuff we found lying around.
With curtains.
And we lived there for a year
On air and sandwiches.

-Darren in Alabama (search phrase: “we made a fort”)

For a Sibling

Sister come close and remember with me.
Dusk on the railway, dress up, mom and dad,
Corner shop porn mags we found in the woods,
The fairy tales of protective brothers.

Chapter one of what they didn’t read us
Said something about a little monster.
We always thought we were being funny,
But she didn’t come back after that day.

They should have been direct and just told us.
Was it there in the drawings, the cartoons?
All by ourselves from morning until dark,
Am I right that they should have just told us?

Do you not remember we were happy,
Children of traditional modern times.
Lives come undone; we don’t have to know why.
Just be with me and tell me who you are.

-Brad on the Upper West Side (search phrase “when we were little”)

For a Sibling

Sister come close and remember with me.
Dusk on the railway, dress up, mom and dad,
Corner shop porn mags we found in the woods,
The fairy tales of protective brothers.

Chapter one of what they didn’t read us
Said something about a little monster.
We always thought we were being funny,
But she didn’t come back after that day.

They should have been direct and just told us.
Was it there in the drawings, the cartoons?
All by ourselves from morning until dark,
Am I right that they should have just told us?

Do you not remember we were happy,
Children of traditional modern times.
Lives come undone; we don’t have to know why.
Just be with me and tell me who you are.

-Brad on the Upper West Side (search phrase “when we were little”)

At Poegles.com, when we read phrases like “anomalies in the sky tell you what to look for”, and ”the stakes for dark matter go beyond cosmology”, we get excited.  Even better are sentences like ”you could think of it as a hamster running around on a wheel in its cage. We cannot see the hamster or the cage, but we can sort of feel the impact of the hamster running.” 

We hope you’ll take some inspiration, too, and write a poegle that addresses this week’s contest theme- ‘lost in space’.  Who knows what you might turn up?  Maybe even some exotic dark matter.  Visit the contest here.

The state of our union is strong.  Our call for poegles on the theme “My Mother” drew many fine poegles this week, none finer than Maternal Instincts by Brad on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  Brad, get ready to get your Miss Mary Mack on because you just won a plastic segmented jump rope.  Nor could we close this first paragraph of our weekly newsletter without acknowledging the latest dynamite poegle from Polly in Virginia, Visiting the Lost City, and a fine collage by Jamie in Brooklyn, My Mother Always Wore.  Our thanks to you all.

The theme for this week’s contest is “Lost in Space.”  Perhaps you saw our notice yesterday of the astronaut whose tool bag drifted off into the ether during her spacewalk.  Apparently the astronaut in question, Ms. Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, took the loss hard:  “There’s still the psychological thing of knowing that we made a mistake and having to live through that,” she reportedly said.  We can only assume that her anxiety was the result not of the pecuniary loss of the tool bag, which apparently contained a couple of grease guns and other odds and ends worth a paltry $100,000, but by the unavoidable contemplation of the infinite that such an occasion would unavoidably cause.

Well, cheer up Ms. Stefanyshyn-Piper.  For all you do, this poegle’s for you.  Possible search phrases for the Friday Poegle Contest might include “once orbit is achieved,” “the man in the moon,” and “to count the stars.”

And finally, don’t forget to track Justin’s progress in bringing poetry to our nation’s schools by growing a handsome mustache. 

With that, happy poegling!

Best regards,

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