2025 White Mice Poetry Competition

On the Runway with Guns

There
was your heaven! The clear
glaze of another life,
a landscape locked in amber, the rare
gleam…
—Derek Walcott, Another Life

Do not listen to the propaganda abroad,
come and see for yourself.
—Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister
of Grenada, 1979-1983

Arrivals

The island rises through purple ash
spat out in a fog of acrid gas
from Soufrière’s fiery mouth.
My chunky blue plane

tilts like a top as the young pilot sings
landing commands to himself:
he cannot see where sea meets runway,
but guesses well.

And at once we’re on the runway
with guns—real ones: cold, loaded, aimed at our plane
by soldiers on the roof of the customs house.
Shocked—stumbling—I get out.

From steaming concrete I move indoors
into glaring yellow bulb light;
the immigration line takes an hour to move
and I’m the only one on it.

Alone in line, papers in hand, guns exploding
in my mind—I dodge fat flies shiny as eyes
buzzing like a city over gunny sacks and crates
stuffed with mail, chickens, cigarettes, rice.

I tell them I’m a writer.
They ask what kind.
“Game-rules writer, here to just play.”
“War games, perhaps? Wait here a moment,” they say…

The guard’s eyes scan me:
What is your identity?
May I read your eyes?
Do you breathe?

*     *     *

The jungle breathes. The iguana in the tree
swings his tail slowly.

The mongoose cracks eggs on a rock in the grass,
the grackle sips rum from the edge of a glass,

while far out at sea, flying fish leap
like hearts, calling to me…

*     *     *

At last I find a taxi that will take me to the house.
I strap myself in and hold tight to the loop.
The driver throws the car into herky-jerky gear

and we enter the jungle at roller-coaster speed,
careen over hillocks of streaming jade,
the lavender horizon framing stark new clarities…

A small ache throbs in one of my teeth:
the driver says that I shouldn’t worry—
a good Cuban dentist lives near the beach.

I erupt, snorting at the image I see:
Ricky Ricardo howling “Babalu,”
chasing me down with a huge tooth drill

from Grand Anse to L’Anse aux Épines!

*     *     *

The goat-air is stifling. I suck it in,
swoon, am taken. We snake
through shadows till blankets of stars
flash their shattered windshields high up above us;
breathless, we speed past resplendent tableaux

of sleeping marble sheep—headlights stabbing
at crimson poinsettias, bursting cups of gold,
tubes of thick honey crawling up the trees.
The windows wide open.
My hair in my eyes.

Icy waterfalls crash down beside us
in quicksilver walls—foil beaten
into molten decibels—clear, pure song
showering the blossoms and dozing white oxen
with verdigris patinas and treefrog sonatinas.

The house peeks out from a hillside monsoon
of bloody bougainvillea, dark as a womb.
In the cool back room I fall deep asleep
and sleep until the crushed-velvet voice of this place
enters me, and it is you.

*     *     *

You appear in the doorway hauling dasheen.
Laughing, I pull you into lantern light,
out of the curtains of rain.

You sprawl on the chaise.
I curl at your feet.
Together we peel the toxic skin

from the veins of each giant leaf
we’ll need to boil for hours
to make callaloo.

Pitchers of soursop. Wine-ripe mangos.
Pure food to cry for, and we do.
This is your kingdom, and I love you.

I am that other life
you would seize and enter,
bash down the door and rush blindly in
to conquer the republic of my past;

but as I reach for you now,
you merely bend down to my wrist’s raised veins
glowing green through translucent skin,
touch your lips to them.

Moonbeams creep
like fingers through the room. Locked
to each other like starfish,
we gape and drown.

*     *     *

In dappled amber light, we wake up to find
a goat curled up on the foot of the bed,
twitchtail lizards on the kitchen wall,
a fat toad burping in the sink.
Our hair stands on end.

And the salt fluffs up
out of the rusty shaker top:
too much humidity here.

A uniformed guard
shuffles around the yard,
poking his shotgun through matted grass,
looking for American coins
or the butt of last night’s cigar.

You rub clove oil on my tooth;
the pain begins to fade. I slice
pawpaw and star fruit into a plate…

A sudden rushing in the trees:
Bullets spring through the yard like fleas—

Departures

The rifle fire was deafening, then
clean air, no sound—then some returned:
gusts in dry leaves, small animals in weeds—
quick gasps in shadows—then nothing.

That night we fled.
Raced in darkness to the cliff at Sauteurs
where we arced and leapt—dove side by side
into massive breakers rolling in fast
to smash against the rockface behind us…
and then the frozen darkness, the weightlessness—
and then your arms and legs around me teaching me
to open to the sea…you held me down and

helped me…the water
came in harsh and silver-cold; you made me
breathe it deeply in—it slammed
down, jammed in my caught
scream—

Spasming curls of seahorse tails
snagged my thick hair, dragged me down;
flittery moonlit gem-studded fishes
streaked all around; you made me
wait, hold the water in—make
it happen:

My arms around you tight, my hands
open, searching,
I found the oozing gouges,
the raw, torn flesh releasing hot, sticky gouts
where horsewhips had slashed
your great-great grandfather’s back
in the dark, pitching ship;
later, in barred stone cells, he and his brothers
were chained to each other, bolted to the walls
in numb concatenation—whipped, beaten
into stunned, desperate
pretense of submission—
black world of pain without end—

You said:

What is    to is    must is.

*     *     *

The guard’s eyes scanned me:
What is your identity?
May I read your eyes?
Do you breathe?

I ran. In my mind I ran. Stood still as a broom,
running through the implications, a brisk breeze
of certainties: I moved forward
resolutely through the customs building,
stood on line, swatted flies, averted my eyes.
Was searched for contraband, dark
hands all over me

(just a game)

and when at last, years later, still burning for you,
I dove back in with my rule-writer’s pen
in my fist, nothing made sense:

“It was clear that the pawns were all men,
moving forward readily, smiling guardedly.
(They were the guards.) They came slowly
but surely, black and white equally
at first. So when the white knights sidestepped
to camouflage their true intent,
I tried to study where they went
but was drowned in the roiling wake
of a renegade rook, crisscrossed as it was
by the bloody path a misled Bishop took…”

The lingering echoes of AK-47s
winged through billowing cumuli of smoke
that hung above the jungle like lunacy:
such thundering was odd, a misspent tactic
arriving much too early—
no one was ready:

RADIO NEWSFLASH:

Mrs. Finton-Smith’s four good hens
have run away again.
Please if you see them,
bring them to she house
on Chasley Street. Wait, mahn—
there be six of them.

House of mahogany, frangipani,
flood-of-butter allamanda;
house of sea spray, ghost crabs, sand,
air humid as skin—
I flew to you with my heart wide open
and learned what it means to be human.

And now you lie in peace beneath palaces of sky,
where heaven’s endless arsenal of shooting stars
explodes like Soufrière each night…curled
like a fist, the roaring Atlantic
lashing the length of your rigid spine to the east,
the dazzling sapphire Caribbean
swirling in the cup of your gentle flesh
to the west,
you are my guide…

Prisoner of Paradise, your beauty
crushes my eyes:
Fly down that blazing runway with me
till we run out of sky.

— Gabrielle LeMay

Notes

In this poem, I describe an imagined experience on the Caribbean Island of Grenada during an equally imagined span of time that telescopes the March 1979 left-wing coup with the October 1983 U.S. invasion. I did spend one week in Grenada in April 1979 (under martial law, shortly after the coup) as well as two weeks in December 1979/January 1980. While there, I fell in love with the island and with one very special young man—and my memories led to this writing.

The 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada was preceded more than two years earlier by a mock invasion staged on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. In these “war games,” Grenada’s code name was “Amber.” While Derek Walcott’s image of “a landscape locked in amber” in the epigraph is most likely coincidental, it is interesting because this Saint Lucian poet did spend time living and teaching in Grenada.

In April 1979, shortly before my first visit to Grenada, La Soufrière volcano on nearby Saint Vincent erupted violently, creating a dense fog of purplish ash that my small LIAT plane had difficulty navigating through.

Leaping off a cliff into the sea to escape hostile forces is deeply embedded in Grenada’s history. When Grenada was taken over by the French in 1650, a group of Carib inhabitants, rather than surrender, fled to a cliff at the north end of the island and leaped to their deaths. Later, the cliff was named “Le Morne des Sauteurs” (“The Hill of Leapers”), and the town that evolved at that location became known as Sauteurs.

“What is to is must is” is probably of local or regional origin. It is a way of saying “Whatever will be, will be,” or “Que sera, sera.”

The quote from Derek Walcott’s “Another Life” can be found in Derek Walcott: Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, page 143.

The slogan as quoted by Maurice Bishop can be found in Forward Ever! Three Years of the Grenadian Revolution: Speeches of Maurice Bishop. Sydney, Australia: Pathfinder Press, 1982, page 126.

Penelope

Sow stands peg leg in mud, dugs drooping,
Long face turned away, no interest in a passer-by,
Ears pointing to some unknown time
When she can lie down in this fenced square
Of wood and wire, the bottom strands gaping.
But look! Her twelve pink and black children
Chase me lightly down the path
Sputter through the leaves falling and the spent rain.
You could scoop one up, feel her little heart
Beating against the taut skin cask of her body.

Penelope is almost always shown sitting down
Exhausted by the weaving, the suitors,
And the unweaving, Telemachus hanging about,
Waiting for a ship to bring relief while out across the sea
Women will one day hang screaming off the back of trucks
Also looking for relief, which may come surprisingly
In the onslaught black of bodies and bullets.

The radiologist hardly regards me
Lying unsheathed on the examination couch
Sounding my depths with his lubricated wand,
My chat about childbirth and caesarean section
Dropping unwanted to the floor. He and my chaperone,
They can’t take a joke. Which means I take everything.
Barely human by the end, I wipe myself and get up.
I’ll know in the post.

And we’re all waiting for some man or other.
In these calm days of sun and wind and waiting
We forget that the wriggling handmaids will all hang.
That when Odysseus gets home, no one gets out alive.

— Jane Maltby

Let’s Steal a Boat

First we steal a boat.

Sculled out from bedlam,
Rowed hard into clump-salted weeds.
Floated oak with a generous hull
And larch for the oars and heavy.
While grey the wake of water deeps
To raven pitch at folded night, full
Nine yards in we shoulder the stars and
Thickly breathe as though our reckless last.

Launched at low dip by the
Stone-lashed wharf, on scuttled nerve
Losing careful sight of the safe
The mouldering ridges of shore.
With slow cutting reach, further losing again
Small sounds from beetling creatures,
Boneyards, turf, the tillage, our
Hero-glut visions of roughed open wave.

To free this endless kink to leave
(A sneaking illness) on we go
Thrown off by those who shake askant
Their permanently licit heads
At drifts like us who never built,
Who never felled a mighty oak,
Who never gathered food enough
To feed the unsalted winter through.

At last at sea, pulling wild and rogue,
The quiet. Nothing more. Nothing from the
Frozen air, from the sunken tides,
Nothing from the idled moon
Who (resting) sags the horizon line. And
Being not of the useful vagabond kind,
Holding instead to vain sodden rope,
From here we’ll fail to fish.

It’s not always easy this stealing of boats.

Congealed in houses they’ll cry down still,
Aggrieved at how poor souls like us
Poor pilot thieves (for such we are)
Could dare release from full parades of
Unused boats, a fairly anecdotal bucket
Begging for escape.
Let’s steal a boat. And delve open
Fresh gutter for this breaking game.

— Judymay Murphy

Migration Inheritance

My grandmother speaks in scale-
model realities: Her train
to Hong Kong didn’t clank, no
diesel clung dizzying
in the close air,
nobody contested
the last seat. I don’t know
how she prepared for severing
her past, alone. Her modesty-
cloaked words disown praise;

it’s vital to starve
the phantoms who drum
regret, thirsting for the life
left—return, return home
to the courtyard square,
the desert breath sky, to tongues
laboriously won. Cold faces
in the winter light, hawthorn fruit
ambered in sugar glaze; joy

binds the heart
to a life unlived.
Lifted high, the bone-white
baton in the conductor’s hand
rises like a kite
and the choir’s lungs fill, desperate
for release. I recognize
my grandmother in a stranger’s words,
for I’ve knelt and seen the shadows
held in her mouth, the blind-
cut scars she endured
to live anew. Gleam, let stones
gleam as we carry them
in our mouths to drown

memories’ murmuring pull.

The haunted congregate
preaching betrayal
of the self who never left.
A signal flare shades the sun
behind a pillar of white smoke
drawn into our lungs—breathe,
it’s only mist, the speech
of whales who plumb
the sea with odes
to bioluminescent stars
adrift in the deep past
we’d left before we evolved
stories to tell.

— Jeremy Pak Nelson

In Irish There Are Nine Directions

Inside our four bed suburban semi
is the centre of our lives now.

To the South, two houses
stood empty when we moved in.
They never went on the market.
The Quarry Mc Daids snapped them up,
put Ukrainians in. The daddy Ukrainian
clashes with the neighbour
who organises the whip-round
for the communal grass cut,
set up the owners’ WhatsApp
to lobby the politicians to hurry up
the flood defences,
bites his nails to the quick,
pays a pre-crash mortgage
on a worthless house
Through my window, I see these men,
foreheads locked like stags about to rut,
their children spectating.
It’s about parking.
The Ukrainian doesn’t want the local’s car
outside his house,
the local has parked there for twenty years,
feels like he’s owed something for keeping
the estate from going ghost.

To the North, is the river whose level
rises quicker than the specialists have ever seen.
One day or year, or decade, a fence will run
in my backyard (once the lawyers get their cut). 
A flood wall will replace my roses and rhubarb.
We’ll believe it when we see the diggers.
I’ll miss the tree where the song thrush perches.
Once we had a sparrow hawk take down a crow.
He returned for days to feast on the carcass,
leaving only feathers and skull.

To the East are boarded up developments,
identical to ours, government owned.
After the flood they didn’t let the people
move back in. Put up a fence and CCTV.
They look grand – I wonder what’s left.
Scavengers surely stripped them clean.

To the West is the pub – also the Quarry
Mc Daids. They’ve Inishowen all sewn up.

Above, House Martins rest in the gutters.

Below, the diggered willow pushes back up.

Outside, the cracks slowly grow.
We can apply for mica redress only when
the fissures are big enough to fit a penny
like the grannies at the slots on the border.

Coming through me is this is the place for us,
for me, close to the sea, in a bowl of mountains,
an hour from my parents. Out of the North
but still in it. Where Donegal meets Inishowen
and The North’s bordered brokenness.

— Cat Brogan

Fortune Telling My Older Self

She gets up early to see the eclipse, fills the humidifier
before bed, actually makes the cinnamon roll recipe
I’ve been saving for the right lover. Her muscles whimper,
holding up all 412 of our bones. She knows the safest place
to bury a body is inside another body. I know that the thing
that holds her back is actually the thing that holds me together.
I am constantly performing for her the story of everyone
we have been. She loves to watch. I can never tell
if she is judging me, or just quiet, but she still keeps the smallest
spoon for my ice cream and the tallest mug for my tea –leaves
the back door open for me to walk out of my life and into hers.
At night, when I watch the corners gather their dark skirts,
I shiver, like twenty rabbits crammed in the broken jaw
of a wolf. I am always whispering the warm mistake
of my life into the corner of her mouth, catching a glimpse
of the amused smile surfacing before it breaks across
her face, preemptively dreaming of falling into her arms.
She smells like all of the years she has loved me.

— Stephanie Saywell

washed up

I do not recognise
this body of mine
caught in the city
estuary-side, watching the trains
and the water leave
behind
window glass and I am washed up
here, left
when the tide went out

I drove here
in a car now scrap
the car my grandmother bought
five hundred miles
south
of her birth
a life line I drove in reverse
peeling back the years
got caught
one hundred miles before the end

I never intended to finish
(I did that
years ago
with someone else
another memory
another history)

and now I find myself home
in the coast-bleached
branches
and the strange places
I have no blood-remembered bond
learning how to be a
new belonging

become this place by
breathing it
as up-river branches
leave behind their forest
identity, and become
liminal, rock-bound
tidal

learn cormorant, seagull, seal
learn city, learn river
learn home

— Helen Smith

Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing can be found in many publications, including The Glacier, Berkeley Poetry Review, and North American Review. His latest book, The Weather of Our Names, was released by Cornerstone Press in September 2025.

Julie Kane has published six books and two chapbooks of poetry, most recently Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 2025). Her poems appear in more than sixty anthologies and textbooks including Best American Poetry and The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. She is a past Fulbright Scholar, Louisiana State Poet Laureate

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025). His previous books and pamphlets include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023); Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020); The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His work for the BBC includes the extended poem Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.