2003 winner

Minneapolis

America, you've laid a cable in my heart
with fifty million channels showing beer and cars
and porn. I watch them all with bored fascination,
a world within a world and yes, I am a part

time businessman learning how to think
in an American accent, out to lardy dinner
before the big game mascot masquerade, a super-
market carnival that's sponsored by a drink

as difficult as opera to enjoy but fizzier.
In the mini-Apple sky the clouds are bruised purple
by searchlights, Go Vikings! and there's evidence of thought
bubbles bursting as they rise above the sober

clink of glasses filled with water and leaking words
that pass for conversation, here in Hiawatha's
Hideaway on Nicollet and Thirteenth Streets
with Cindy, Larry, Rich and Sandy, our team of experts

on digital manipulation, imaging and scanning
(documents, primarily). It's the end of a long
project, Sandy on fulfillment, Larry, hardware,
Cindy programming and Rich, project planning,

while I just write the cheques and wander through the warehouse
district every lunchtime down to the chocolate milkshake
of the Mississippi churning towards St. Paul
and watch as the glacier belt winds arrive and douse

the flaming leaves of yet another Indian summer.
To the skyways! A floating island docked at mezzanine
level, a city within a city riddling the heart
of the grid with portholed shopping tubes from which a number

of minor wonders can be seen: stainless steel
art museums, Minnehaha falls, a giant
spider's egg about to burst from Hubert Humphrey
Metrodome. I'm keeping my end of the deal;

‘My nape please', says Cindy as we're walking home,
meaning: massage it. These people cannot mourn;
our bedroom is a furnace. ‘My nipple is my Naples',
she cries and rides me steady as a metronome.

by David Musgrave

Dave is a Sydney-based poet who works as an IT manager for a Health Insurance Company. He has previously won the Henry Lawson Poetry Prize, The Sidney Nolan Gallery Poetry Prize and the Broadway Poetry prize. Dave has a PhD on Menippean satire from the University of Sydney and has published poems, shorts stories and essays in a number of Australian journals. His first collection of poetry 'On Reflection' will be published in 2004 by interactive press.