The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/The Nation ’06, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. Now in its thirty-second year, it is an annual contest for poets whose work has not been published previously in book form. The new winners are Nicky Beer, Eric Leigh, Shara Lessley and Sandy Tseng. This year’s judges are James Richardson, Laurie Sheck and Elizabeth Spires. As in the past, manuscripts are judged anonymously. Distinguished former winners of Discovery/The Nation include Michael Collier, Susan Mitchell, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Arthur Smith, Ann Townsend and Philip Schultz. This year’s Discovery/The Nation event, featuring readings by the four winners, is scheduled for 8:15 pm on Monday, May 8, at The Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue (92nd Street and Lexington Avenue) in New York City.    –Grace Schulman, poetry editor

I have seized the very edge of my life as though it were a grappling-hook.

Once I had a body of indescribable lushness. Then a mouth that was all obscene invitation.

Then the rush of gray made me someone’s mother, then a rigid mockingbird, then a mother again.

I am certain that beyond me there are possibilities that strain the very limits of astonishment.

Two bodies folded into a spasm of exclamation. A gnarled tree wrought from pure history.

A city, and a city, and a city, and another city, each one vacant and in- violate. Yet always

this antiphon, blanched and wholly complete. One day I will see the horror of my total

self: a vivisection laid out in tidy, separate dishes, oddly bloodless.

Nicky Beer

though the days were cut short

it does not ease our waiting; we hear the rumors and sounds of war, how the dead come home by phone, by the arrangement of white gladiola, by the contents of their pockets

when he leaves it’s dark morning and the door he locks behind him reminds us that love and war are companions; this is the door that separates the wounded from the able

today we learn a new word, we count our supplies, change the advisory from yellow to orange, orange to yellow– we do not plan on running to the house to get our belongings

Sandy Tseng

Harm’s Way

I’ve brought you here, to the base of the great tower where you can see the two bridges that hold this city and imagine the places they might take you, because I believe in staging and the prop of the moon.

Because I want this evening to be aria, the eye of the storm where the lead actor turns to face the crowd and comes clean with what he knows. But sometimes there’s no music in the truth.

Especially right now, with me about to break your heart and possibly my own. Soon, certain words will turn me into cell counts, the roulette wheel of the centrifuge spinning quietly in your head.

So I stall with small talk, how the tower was built for those who fought the flames of the great quake. Now tourists pay ten bucks a head for a view those firemen never knew. I rail on

until you place your hand against my chest, the same spot my mother always touched, every time she slammed the brakes, her arm flying out in front of me to hold me back,

no matter the seat belt around my waist. “I never think,” she always said, “my arm just goes…” her voice trailing off into a quiet where the best part of us resides. Some sentences cannot be finished,

others can barely be started. As I say the words, I am steeled for the way that your eyes widen, how your lips part and your jaw goes slack. But for all of my rehearsal, I never thought you might,

in the shadow of the monument built for those who were once lost, take my face in your hands and reclaim me with a kiss, house lights in the distance being darkened one by one.

Eric Leigh

The Firebird Ballet Russes: Tamara Karsavina, June 1910

Breast    thrust frontward,   her point-work’s one-three-two one-two proves    (pride, fear, pleading, might) more to flight than either feather or

wing.    Everything   about this bird is built for likeness–    beveled tail arched back, she razes the air about her. Even

the    huntsman burns:   plucking her coxcomb, the fire-dazzled    image singed in his noble glove. Of bodice, plumage, costume,

crown,    only her   ruin seems human–yes, hers is that    old tale in a nutshell: the egg contains the soul. Threatened,

her    delicate   honeycombed bones wrench back to divert    the magician king. Love’s ultimate sacrifice! Art,

none-    theless, knows   too the meaning of stillness: so gives    the bird her final pose as her prince (with his mistress) departs–

though    who, when pressed   to detect on that darkened stage even    the slightest quiver, could fail to recognize the remark-

able quickness of her caged-in heart?

Shara Lessley