You stand proudly in my kitchen,
Quietly humming as you do your work.
You are the envy of all my other appliances,
Particularly the blender, who wants to be just like you.
Covered wall to wall with Chinese take-out menus
And pizza coupons that have long since expired,
I know that somewhere within that forest of savings and phone numbers of girls
that I will never call; there is something cold and heartless waiting to be
touched.
As I open the door I am awestruck by the sight of your glowing inner essence.
I would stare for hours at your magnificence,
If you didn’t have the electric bill on your door reminding me how much it cost
the last time I left your door open.
I reach inside you,
Past the turkey sandwich,
Past the piece of cheesecake I was saving,
Past something that I cannot readily identify,
And I find…a golden nugget of truth...next to the baking soda.
I slowly close your door,
Your little light turns off, gently whispering goodnight.
Dreams of another visit dance through my head,
Rainbows, purple unicorns and Alf…
It must’ve been something I ate.
You are my refrigerator, my…friend,
And I will always love you,
Until you are reduced to scrap metal and turned into a microwave.

The Lighter Side of Engineering
By: Andy Gallagher, Undergraduate in Materials Science and Engineering
Honorable Mention

There once was a kid falling asleep
In a class about stresses on beams,
A contest of poetry,
For engineers only,
Was the answer to his wildest dreams.

There once was an engineer named Brad,
Whose major was picked by his dad,
Brad hated equations,
Switched to education,
And now Brad's glad dad was sad.

Avagadro was a very smart man,
With way too much time on his hands,
Six point zero two three,
Times ten to the power of twenty-three,
I'll never need to know that again.

There once was an engineer named Steve,
Who thought he could be an EE,
He tried all the math,
The math kicked his ass,
So he switched his major to humanities.

There once lived a professor named Orange,
Whose name wasn't conducive to poems.

There once was an engineer who liked physics,
He understood Newtonian mechanics,
His confidence was high,
But one day it died,
When he had to learn quantum mechanics.

There once was a 5th year engineer,
Who had to start worrying about a career,
He heard that his degree
Would earn him lots of money,
But the Army was all he could find that year.

South, I Say
By: Christian Miller, Undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering
1st Place in Student – Non-technical – CoE Category

South, I Say

Gladys attempts the smokescreen, feigning
false teeth misplaced.
The growing horseshoe of saliva
soaking her lima bean green robe
goes unnoticed.
With a meaty smack of the gum
and lark’s whistle, she
swoons for the sentries.
The orderlies are in disarray.
I drop the large print Reader’s Digest,
amplified font askew on the floor,
and dive headlong into unattended laundry.

Amid the oat-bran shock of urine
and offed whites, I slide
mole-like.
When the cart returns to rounds,
the listing of its belly recalls
the womb sway. Amniotic
ammonia, compromised catheters,
and other unlit offal
do not deny the warmth.

I emerge in the store room--
a reeking rebirth
in my sexless years. Stiff
spaghetti of arteries and ankle flesh
cascade over orthopedic shoes,
As I stand.
An August orgy of crickets
catcall and strum gummy legs
for the last lay of the evening.

There are no signposts, this far from town.
Nobody wishes a visit
from the stowed old.
Through a pearly cosmos in my cataracts,
the coveted pinpricks of the Greeks
smolder yet.
South, I say to Scorpio,
nightgown a taught sail in summer’s
insistent draft.
This creaking hull, worm-holed,
will hold
one more voyage.

It’s Just All about the Rules
By: Bettina Bair, Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Member
1st Place in Non-student – Technical – CoE category

"It's just all about the rules,"
My computing teacher said.
"The computer is a fool.
It can't read what's in your head"

My computing teacher said,
"Without imagination,
It can't read what's in your head --
Just coded operations."

"Without imagination,
Computers cannot do art.
Just coded operations
Moving bits around its heart."

"Computers cannot do art,
But for a skilled artist's hand,
Moving bits around its heart,
Elegance can be programmed."

"But for a skilled artist's hand,
The computer is a fool.
Elegance can be programmed.
It's just all about the rules."

The Geese (or, How I Know You Love Me)
By: Cyndy Bonsignore, Associate Director, Engineering Experiment Station
1st Place in Non-student – Non-technical – CoE category

“You know geese mate for life,”
I say as we are getting out of the car and beginning to carry in the groceries.
(And though I often say things out-of-the-blue,
it is not the case this time because we have heard the flock’s faint calls
not far…now closer.)
I have two bags and you have three,
but we both turn and pause on the doorstep as their sounds come even nearer.
I watch you scan the air over the pine trees
and try to calculate which direction they will come from
and where they will go.
Then they appear: soft brown bellies, long graceful necks and powerful wings –
each aspect of their appearance its own cause for wonder and delight,
but taken in their entirety, beyond understanding, awesome.
We hold our breath as they whir overhead
and move in a V toward the river in the valley to our west.
You look at me and smiling you say,
“You know, they mate for life.”

Visions Aforethought
By: Cecilia Hennessy, Graduate Student in the School of Environment and Natural Resources
2nd Place in Student – Technical – CFAES category

Situated silently between
ATGGCTATTA´
and
GTTTCAAGCT´
tightly coiled snug within
the tangled double helix
I keep my promises secret
and gaze upwards to stars of ribosomes
oblong planets of mitochondria
and blinking microsatellites
in a great nebula of plasma
my cellular galaxy.
I dream of what will become of me

Will the body beyond live long enough for me to tell my secret?
Will I be the tattletale at the crime scene
or at the paternity testing center?

Will my name be cursed through clenched teeth
at the trial
or on the hospital bed?
Or will it be passed like an illicit whisper to the next generation?
Will I be studied in the bright lab,
injected into the strange bodies of mice
to perform like a circus monster on a small stage?

For now, they do not know me.
They know not my name or my address.
I can sit here tranquilly between ATGGCTATTA´ and GTTTCAAGCT´
meddling with amino acids
in my own special way.
I love sabotage.
I can’t help it.
I am TATCCGAT´
You will know me someday.

A Sonnet for the Breaker of My Heart, My Study Organism
By: Dan Shustack, Graduate Student in the School of Environment and Natural Resources
5th Place in Student – Technical – CFAES category

When tree buds break in the warm spring time air
I search the woods for my little brown bird
Once caught in my net she chirps with a scare
With a bright silver band her leg is gird

She builds her nest; she lays her four white eggs
She incubates until pink chicks emerge
With mouths open wide each fat baby begs
After fourteen days from the nest they’ll surge

My dear brown bird has shared her life with me
And I have come to call her my sweet heart
Now from the cool autumn days she must flee
For nine months from my life she must depart

If next spring she does not return to me
A new dear will provide my life with glee

Fractured Glacial Till
By: Dr. Ann Christy, Poetry Forum Co-organizer

Glaciers grind forward shearing diamict below
Illinoian, Wisconsinan, Kansan ice sheets
Advance and ablade, advance and ablade

Isostatic rebound as tons of ice melt back
Pressure release, a weight lifted off
Land rises and falls, rises and falls

Mastodon tracks baked by the Pleistocene sun
Solar desiccation and seasonal change
Freeze thaw, freeze thaw

Thick muddy glacial outwash and clayey till
Cracks, fissures, fractures, joints
Endless cycles of nature over time

Leaving behind
Only cracks in dirt

The Sandbox
By: Julie Graf, Poetry Forum Co-organizer

We looked forward to those summer days
crimson skin and the scent of loam
the backyard, a petite plot of land
was our playground and worldly palette

With plastic pails and flimsy shovels
we razed the weathered dunes
and leveled the landscape like a glacier
our towers and castles were built on sand

A few drops of nourishment made the earth mold well
but a river of rain washed the cities away
the aftermath left beautiful spirals, winding streams
a nuisance, we found something else to play

Gods of our plot, landlords of the square
we were prized architects in our minds
competing to see who could build the highest tower
we traced our battle lines through the sand with our fingers

Occasionally a vine would creep into our sanctuary
the weeds poked through and we pulled them by the root
for ours was a contoured, controlled design
liberated from feral entanglements

We possessed the knowledge of the pyramid builders
a land once wild in our possession
you could squeeze the sand in your palm and watch it fall
like sinners in the hands of an angry god

The box is gone now, and most of our medium
a trace of our lively disturbance remains
a small square plot discolored and sore
where only the vines will grow

The Window of My Face (for Eva)
By: Stewart Diemont, Graduate Student in Food, Agricultural, and Biological Engineering
Grand Prize winner in 2004 FABE/ACSM Poetry Forum

The rain dripped down the window of my face,
so suddenly opened. The taxista raced another taxi

through the mountain pass. Todo sale bien, all will come out well.
A plane waited for me on the tarmac. They do that here,

for an emergency. They all knew it was an emergency,
the travel agent with a phone in each ear,

the woman at the counter who caught my bag,
security guards who lifted the cordons as I ran.

Rapido! They knew you couldn’t wait. Your mom
tapped me an e-mail, the amniotic fluid still flowing.

I saw children and dreamed of you.
What does it mean 33 weeks? Weeks are nothing.

Now at twenty months, you stomp NO NO NO.
It rings in my ears, a sound as sweet as Bach.