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		From: "Gary"   To: "'muses review'"   Subject: RE: E-Newsletter: Nominees for 2nd Muses Prize - 3rd Update  Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:57:12 -0500   HTML Attachment [ Download File | Save to Yahoo! Briefcase ]   Andy,     The editors of Gival Press announced today that they have nominated my poem "Reporting from Fallujah" for the 2005 Pushcart Prize. This is a great honor, even if I don't get included in the final cut. I am very pleased.  Can we include this fact in my bio somehow? "Reporting from Fallujah" was written almost ten years ago now, long before Sadam Hussein's regime was toppled. The poem was based on an actual reporter's account of his own near-abduction while reporting in Iraq.   Here is the poem as it appeared in the journal Purple Dream in June of 2004 and as later anthologized in Poetic Voices without Borders by Gival Press in May of 2005. Wish me luck!  Gary  Reporting from Fallujah  by  Gary Lehmann I think it was the noise of the hob-nail boots  on the stairs at the end of the hall that first woke me.  In a place like this an abduction or disappearance is always possible and it pays to make some plans.  I jumped from my bed and straightened the covers, throwing two pillows against the wall.   I grabbed my bath robe and paddled toward the  sliding glass door that led to the open porch. As I passed through the door, I slipped the latch  so it would lock behind me as I went out. I just closed it, when I began to hear the pounding  of a bludgeon and the shouts of angry men.  I crawled under the plastic table and backed myself  into the far corner of the tiny porch.  Then I reached out for the leg of one chair to further obstruct the view. That was all I could do.