1st Place
‘Rubble’ by Maria Zalessky
“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise… this storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” —Walter Benjamin
Before Monday, Palmyra was the model
who said all girls look pretty in fur.
Her face worn with time, body intact,
she slinked up catwalk neural pathways
arched our eyebrows in personal mirrors.
Behind us, we saw sledgehammers
shatter articles, power
tools in Nimrud defaced everything.
Faces are forbidden, even
lamassu suffer suspicion
their hearts were ripped from stone
lion bodies, wings shattered, futile
powder, bone dust mixed with sand.
Before Monday, we thought up a world
before militarized peace unfurled Persian
rugs on crumpled Syrian stones, before
it swaddled humble Hammurabi and demolished
ancient high-rise temples for the audacious assertion
of their rosy time-ripened columns against
the God’s eye blue of the sky.
How wrong were we to imagine worlds before
Monday where professors are not warriors nor soldiers not
headless criminals but intellectuals, models simply consultants,
a call to prayer not a cry to war
on our past.
BIO: Maria Zalessky lives in Denver with her cat. She has been published in bottlec(r)ap, The Crucible, and Cellar Door.
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