Reza Abdoh 2021 Prize Winners

Tofu Ink Arts Press:

In Honor of Reza Abdoh

Visionary Arts Poetry Prize goes to arraigo/ By K.Eltinaé

Tofu Ink Arts Press:

In Honor of Reza Abdoh

Visionary Arts Poetry Prize Honorable Mentions

Lee Ann Brown

The Earth Book

Another Green World

Each song a magical toy

What we want to be is

Full of greenest weeds

Unfamiliar storybook lush

To play a ball with bell inside

Spicy like clove road

Or cinnabar tinkling some kind of deep

Lacquer box open sound

A riddle song So long sung

i am dissociating on the day George Floyd’s killer is going to trail

Down with white male Chauvinist Pigs

Stephen flies to Minneapolis with his sign

It reads America’s very Soul is on trial

Footsteps on the fly smack

Eno as Blake goes outside each night

To hear his brothers and sisters as angels in the trees

Jones Irwin

The Female Rimbaud

i.m. Rosemary Tonks

The metempsychosis of that infamous slave trader

With the early verve in French verse

Took this errant soul to London environs

Emerging in the late 1960s as a female poète maudit

She pushed messages of secret liaisons and prohibited desire

And had her books burned by herself in the end

So as to hide the transmigratory evidence

All that daring and they killed her

Exchanging her self-ironising contempt for their disdain

A harlot in an open dressing gown incapable of shame

But who decided that? I see her

Extra modest in her wedding dress

At the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris

In a cross-legged photo with a friend in 1948, Mrs Trent

Like some saint whose only blasphemy

Is beauty and poise beyond her contemporaries

She was incriminated by her verse

And what it revealed of her unconscious

A woman too, of course,

Fancy that.

III

If you cultivated a loucheness it

Was nonetheless reinvented via London

And the Paris of the Symbolists

So your hymn to Sixties’ hedonism

Was never of any ordinary variety

This was your feminist poetry contra poetry

Even Baudelaire stood askance and told

Arthur that only he could truly read

This new voice, this transgressive verse

To which Rimbaud replied: I gave up all

This jazz years ago. Still, there is

Something here needs redress

Did you really lose your identity

There in the bed making love to the wrong person?

After all, could you know right from wrong

Once you had read Nietzsche and gained flexibility?

Free thinking in morals is a dangerous art

Not a science it is tantalisingly vague

When we seek its advice

Rarely did you seek its counsel

Preferring to err on the side of the irresponsible

Refusing to take due care

Later in the great retirement home of Bournemouth

For a while you took time to contemplate your epoch defining poetry

To remember how your writing set the senses reeling

But by then these had become terrible decisions

Which scarred you with ferocious indelible harm

Made you fall out of love with your muse

After all these years you still effervesced

But differently now you stood silent

Listened like an Oriental skill

Cupped your ears to the voice of mediums’ omens

That life you led was not yours but theirs

All those chosen loves were as fake

As your limpid orgasms and your diffident marriage

Now that Mother and Father were both gone

A sense of self could finally be written

But at long last without books and without pens

Ken Edward Rutkowski

COLOR OF HOPE

I am Hon Ba shot at three times 2 misses one small round hit no damage done in the corpuscular golf ball grind two eyes in the back of my head looking out into forever not knowing when it will end if it will end if it ever does all certainty in life lost forgiveness gone Hon Ba great golden eye big rock spit stretching out into the shoreline the man who did it lost his life let down his own shield in carelessness by his gun now sits Jesus’ arms outstretched looking at me every day I pray for him to talk to me to blow the swings away from the sun to come down after the rain in the summer time in the morning time in this once in a lifetime the rains come in long afternoons barreling over Vung Tau Long Hai Phuoc Hai Ho Tram endless South China Sea Hon Ba Lady Island a hole a golden shoal around her neck Jesus’ arms orange over red flame trees white Hoa Su under his nose the pulse from his fingers running away they seem hardly flowers at all but color and the movement or shape perhaps of restlessness the growing need to be in the wind with the sun in the sky the man he left and went under the sea inside the rocks I hear the hissing granules of barnacles twisting in their shells you see when the waves come in from the West the wind blows blue blood in the leaves the white horses come out from the sky bow down in pelting rain I see levels I see rays folding in bold trained flowers the sea the color of new life Neruda wrote in green ink his personal color of hope green rings green mind all the man could find tied to his umbilical line was Jesus to answer him speak Jesus it’s me please I have no prayers nothing only forgiveness I've taken away all practicality and certainty in life giving it back to the last shot unto the man who never harmed me never hungered never held me and finally you ask why do you not speak of dreams and leaves anymore well look at the crumbs for bread left in the streets and the women and men with their heads held down wondering why what are we going to do my mind's lost call hardly alone the color of movement is personal forever holy to grow.

*Hon Ba is an island, connected by a rocky spit to land…the view in the pic is broad/elliptical, on the left is the island and on the right another part of the peninsula…the lines are fishing lines in the sand.

Ashley Parker Owens

A poem in three images

Lee Ann Brown is the author of five books of poetry beginning with Polyverse (Sun & Moon, 1999) and most recently, Other Archer (PURH, 2015). She is also the founding editrix of Tender Buttons Press.

K. Eltinaé is a Sudanese poet of Nubian descent. His debut won The 2019 Beverly Prize for International Literature (Eyewear Publishing) and Muftah´s Creative Writing Competition,co-winner of the 2019 Dignity Not Detention Prize (Poetry International). He is the winner of Tofu Ink Arts Press: In Honor of Reza Abdoh Visionary Arts Poetry Prize.

Jones Irwin teaches Philosophy and Education in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. He has published poetry most recently in Poetry London, Showbear Family Circus, Passengers Journal, Plainsongs, The Dewdrop and with Tofu Ink.

Ashley Parker Owens is an Appalachian writer, poet, and artist living in Richmond, Kentucky. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers University. ashleyparkerowens.wordpress.com

Ken Edward Rutkowski is an artist/ writer living in southern Vietnam. His work has been featured in Fiction International (issue 54), Tofu Ink Arts Press, The Fiction Pool, Synchronized Chaos, The Journal of Experimental Fiction & Paragraph Line.