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The Bordighera Poetry Prize

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1st Runner-up: 2006 Bordighera Poetry Prize
Sponsored by the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation
Michael LaSorsa Steffen

for Pre-mature Gods

Emily Ferrara was 2006 winner for The Alchemy of Grief

Click to: Awards Ceremony, Nov. 9th, 2006 Poets House

THE DAUGHTERS OF LOT | SPIRITUAL SUPERMARKET | THE RAPTURE |

Biographical Note:
MICHAEL LA SORSA STEFFEN is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Vermont College. His poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals including POETRY, POTOMAC REVEIW, THE LEDGE, POET LORE and RHINO, to name a few. Michael's manuscripts have been shortlisted for the Blue Light Press, Defined Providence Press and Bright Hills Press Book Awards, as well as the Brittingham/Pollak and Levine Poetry Prizes. His first book, NO GOOD AT SEA, was published by Legible Press in 2002. In the same year, he was granted a Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Michael currently resides in Roseto, Pennsylvania, a town known for its Italian American hisitory and traditions.

Distinguished Poet-Judge of The Bordighera Poetry Prize, 2006, Daniela Gioseffi, wrote: "Michael La Sorsa Steffen's work shows fine craft and originality, as well as a grasp of the ironies of civilization. He possesses a sardonic wit about contemporary life and cultural history. Pre-Mature Gods contains intelligent and skillful poetry that makes for very enjoyable reading. This poet displays a wide sensibility, imbued with good, rational, sense in our wild and crazy era. He offers a wry smile as he points out irrational, and sometimes tragic, follies. That smile helps us to survive as human in these threatening, often absurd, and puzzling times."

Sample poems from Pre-mature Gods THE DAUGHTERS OF LOT

All children are the seeds of God,
even the children of the children of Lot.
Thinking they were alone

on the earth, and to save his bloodline,
his daughters offered him wine,
then slept with him when they thought he was drunk.

But Lot knew each when she lay down
and when she rose. It was the same
with both. And thus were the daughters of Lot

impregnated by their father.
And the eldest bore him a son, as did the younger.
Lot was twice afraid—

not when the Lord rained fire on Sodom,
nor when his fleeing wife, in the instant she looked back,
fused to that moment—

but only when he entered his daughters,
driven by the power
of his own lust, and then his shame

as he watched, over time,
their bellies swelling to preserve
the only seed that mattered.

In one version, she is watching
helium balloons in the shape of seraphim
cut loose by a random gust.

In another, they’re inflated sex dolls
leading a herd of party sheep from Pete’s Novelty
into a slow ascension. Regardless of the account,

the air is hot, like the air after a fire,
and the doll-angels, arms held wide,
for all we know, in perpetual praise to the god above,

while another turn of wind whips them up,
and their shadows bob through early morning cornfields,
chevroned by the same hot breeze, drift through

a child’s fantasy
and the fetish-filled dreams of lonely men,
their purpose now raised

to another imminent waywardness,
as this woman of devout faith
and poor eyesight gazes

from the interstate and believes
what her parish priest recounted
in sermon after fiery sermon, muscles tensing as he spoke

those revelatory words, The end is near,
has finally come to pass,
that never again will there be

barriers between her and all her beloveds.
She can see they will be joined forever
and ride the white light of this last great morning

as death delivers up its dead.
None of the details matter, really—
whether angels or dolls,

the woman’s car still idles on the shoulder,
a door open to oncoming traffic,
other cars swerving

as she wanders across the interstate.
And further up the highway,
the semi driver locking his brakes in a deafening screech,

still leans on his horn
in the moment before he mows her down
while she watches the sun-stricken bodies drift across the sky.

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