Judith Pacht's book of collected poems, Summer Hunger, was published by Tebot Bach in October, 2010. Her chapbooks, User’s Guide and St. Louis Suite were published by Finishing Line Press in 2009 and 2010.  Her manuscript Vectors was a finalist for the 2008 Philip Levine Prize and the Tupelo Press open submission competition. Pacht won Honorable Mention in the 2007 Robert Frost Award and the 2007 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry competitions. She was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society, Edgar Bowers competition.
   
     A three-time Pushcart nominee, her work includes poems published in Ploughshares, Runes, Phoebe, Cider Press Review and Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright (Lost Hills Press. 2007), The Poetry of Relationships (Canadian Federation of Poets, 2009), The Gastronomic Reader (University of California Press) and Tebot Bach’s Anthology of California Poets, 2003 and 2006. Writers at Work featured her poem, Surface, as their January, 2009 selection. Her chapbook, also her first poetry collection, Falcon (Conflux Press), was published in 2004. 


To a Fossil

Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, 1959 

Hide and seek,  
a run under palm frond canopies.   
After someone like  me must have drowsed
on jackal pelts, you rank with sweat,
steaming, four arms, four legs tangled,
listening in the yellow-eyed dark
for the crackle of a step from the streambed
where rivercresses grow.

You slept away millennia
in sediment with hare and fish and bird,
once carrion of the hawk
circling above.  Even now
he eyes the rifted gorge.  Spies your jaw.          
You, blood to stone to hand, my hand
that pulls you from the hot earth,   
speechless.

from Summer Hunger, 2010, Tebot Bach Press

vii.   (from the St. Louis Suite)
 
Wild white, 
staccato black

Julia’s bobolink stacks hyperbolas
in the air over tallgrass prairie,

flashes melody mid-flight,
something like granddad’s

light love talk, his flashing
eyes, dark, sharp, the smooth

song, the pipesmoke circles
he blew in her eyes

until they bedded in the grass
–  and always the bobolink’s

clink-clink, his metallic chirp
in sedge, in cattail,

his molt and skulk in marsh.
She did the wash, hung up sheets,

waited the terrible wait –
Will he migrate south?

No more on quiver-wing
singing, wooing in red clover.

He was like that once.
 
from St. Louis Suite, Finishing Line Press, 2010


AS SEEN IN A HAMMACHER SCHLEMMER CATALOGUE:
 

The Hands Free Soap Dispenser
 
allows you to apply
liquid
 
to any part of your
or someone else’s
 
body   say a thigh
or
 
without having to touch
someone else’s nevermind
 
no pumps   no handles
(to prevent cross-contamination)
 
unless you wildly desire
cross-contamination    be advised:
 
an infrared sensor
detects the proximity of
 
your   or your loved one’s
parts
 
& the dispenser has
a ½ second delay   to insure
 
proper placement
under the nozzle
 
you can regulate the speed
at which liquid is released
 
from your   or his  or the dispenser’s
stainless steel body
 
& all this can be done
on a countertop   or mounted on a wall
 
whichever way you like it
hardware included                    

From 
User' Guide, Frontline Press


Judith Pacht Poet

© 2011 Judith Pacht


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