Quantum Entanglement by Leslie Williams Honorable Mention, Ruth Stone Poetry Prize

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A gang of turkeys has settled in the yard.

They’re disagreeable, eating my new grass seed.

Ugh the big unbalanced

bodies and skinny necks with wattles, caruncles, snoods.

Spurred shanks and awful twisting feet. Now a limping jenny

goes fancy-footing by, as if across parade grounds

where wonders may appear, the majesty

of every ugly thing

turning beautiful, the way

anything loved will be, which reminds me

of this woman with whom

I’m having a feud—she doesn’t know it

of course, and must not think about me

at all, or if she does it’s with a slight

dismissive snort, because I should really

know my place—this morning in the mirror

a mote in my eye

I was trying to remove

and I thought: definitely, her faults

I grow painfully aware

amount to a speck compared

to those same mountains in me,

so I’ve lately grown obsessed

with physics: force and action, spooky action

at a distance, and love. Always

love. You can’t see it

but what it makes you do is real.

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[av_one_half]Leslie Williams’ most recent book is Even the Dark, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Image, and elsewhere. She lives near Boston.[/av_one_half]