Third prize winner of the 3rd Annual Geist Erasure Poetry Contest.

Trouble comes, naked and tough

as grief. It takes most everything:

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our books, bones, bags

of used batteries.

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People are just tired and quiet

and trouble gets what it sees,

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penny by penny.

Help hobbles in, brutish, sad,

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nothing holy about it,

toothy, money-avid. Not

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at all very different.

A drear argument to sort out.

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I want it to end. Sun, rain,

clouds and then sun again.

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Pennywhistle concerns. Who will

stand up for me against

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the still wind, the cold sun,

the not one or the other?

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Trouble is a white blossom

delicate as a tar flow.

Erasure poetry begins with removing letters and words from an existing text in order to create a new stand-alone piece that provides new meaning to the original passage. For the 3rd Annual Geist Erasure Poetry Contest, we posted an excerpt from a prose poem, Cottonopolis, by Rachel Lebowitz.

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