Winning Entries
We received over 200 submissions. There were scores of poems that called to us for a re-read and to choose among them was a very difficult task. In the final cut, each of our winning poets had at least two poems in the running.
What common element characterizes the winning poems?
They each have a feeling of immediate relevance while connecting with something vaster. They bring something large into specific focus. But there’s something else. In going back and writing a note for each winner and honorable mention, it becomes clear that the selection came down to the visceral.
Each winning poem not only engaged thought and emotion, but grabbed and tugged at something deeper, and harder to describe … which is, after all, why we have poetry. The winning poems continue to call for a re-read, and, with each reading, deliver something new.
First Prize — ‘A poet, living in Rome’ by Fionn Bookmite
Mine is one of the little hills.
I look down a gentle slope and the words
spill out of me and down the hill,
running to get to the Sacred Way
and parade themselves.
Lines slink around my feet
and trip me, vanishing when I look down.
I follow them, chasing, calling,
and pass the little house of Cinna.
My neighbour is a lawyer, precise,
and lives to make everything tidy.
The doorway is clean, recently swept and washed,
even sprinkled with dried rosemary.
Cinna has prepared his house as neatly
as he parses his rolling clausulae.
The Temple of Tellus looms on the other side,
and I dash through its shadow. “You can’t avoid me,”
says the Temple, “for I am Mother Earth.”
I whisper a prayer in iambic tetrameters
and hurry on, trying to catch up with the paragraphs
now happily gambolling at the foot of the hill.
I round them up and speak firmly to them
and they fall into dutiful crocodile lines.
As I walk at their head, I sort them out,
swapping places for some, making others
stand up more smartly or walk a little
slower. A turn around the Forum —
and my lines are neat and pinned,
each wriggling word brushed.
My poem is done. I head for home.
Fionn taught Latin and Greek and Ancient History for twenty-five years before moving to the Middle East where she now is a lady of leisure and is finally getting down to that novel she always knew she had in her.
Poet’s Website | Amazon Author Page
Judge’s Comments
“What delight to see historic ruins spring to life. This poem paints in a palette from deepest ochres to brightest primaries. A dead language’s poetry, law, and religion are invoked here with such a refreshingly playful spirit, the ancients are humanized, accessible, relevant, and joyful.”
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Second Prize — ‘Salmon’ by Blitz
Silver clad companions of the creek,
you wade in shallow pools
regaining strength to go upstream,
scraping bellies on mossy stones
as the trees tremble with feathers of the gulls.
Your journey through morphing waters
has altered you, with red gills
filtering the ocean into freshwater.
With your promise to lay birth and die,
your orange flesh gleams split-open.
I witness your karmic drama, watching
over your cyclic return. You flow in liquid
like sperm, frenzic, in exhaustion, with ripened
bellies of fire. I too have come far from
my motherland, transformed much like you.
By the winds of another language,
the utterance of my mother tongue
faintly echoes across oceans.
Perhaps one day I will return again,
by the same waters that have transfigured you.
Blitz (AutumnBlitz Xenobuilder) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.
Blitz is a Korean American, a child of immigrant culture, born to teachers of language. He studied fine arts (painting, drawing, sculpture), has exhibited locally in the US and abroad, notably in Spain where he traveled via an Artist In Residence stipend in his search for Lorca’s duende. Blitz came to poetry later in his life on discovering open mics and workshops in Second Life®.
Judge’s Comments
“Fleshing out its topical but timeless theme of an immigrant’s loss and longing, this poem’s arc speaks to anyone who has ever been steered by the urgent demands of survival, and yet has looked back with a longing to return to source, to origins. That is to say, it speaks to anyone.”
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Third Prize — ‘in search of a name’ by BB
he talks of falling though the cracks
that everyone else simply steps over
the crack is a crevasse in a field of ice he says
a narrow anomaly, blue ice in the depths
where you can fall and reach the color of sky
but the sky isn’t the freedom he looks for he says
I say the cracks are simply lines in the sidewalk
everyone knows sidewalks
everyone I know knows sidewalks
no, he says the crack is a crevasse and growing
it’s global warming affecting the collective soul
I toe his cap on the sidewalk, sigh, toss in a few coins
what good is spare change in a crevasse I wonder
unless it’s to buy coffee on the fall to the sky.
BB is the Second Life®-only half of a metaphorical chimera — her sole purpose is to write or attempt to write or appear to be attempting to write. The other half lives a mundane life in a rainy city by the ocean and enjoys long walks on the beach and quiet chats over coffee.
Judge’s Comments
“Contemporary, topical, and casual, this poem tosses a spare coin in the cap of critical issues of our day, and we watch that coin fall and spin into bottomless sky. The little things we try to do, the enormity of our time’s challenges, the vastness of eternity, all crash into impossible perspective here.”
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Highly Commended Poems
NO KITTY HAWK by Qwynn
I count the time in burnt logs
reduced to ashes,
like time spent staring at the snow,
feeding the insatiable need
of the fire, at minus 17 Fahren-
height — so low.
Tell me Elon — when you think
of cold, I bet it is not in joules
to keep your cockles warm.
It’s a hard nut to crack,
SPACE,
your final frontier.
X marks the launch today.
FALCON ready
lifting HEAVY loads
— and what?
You are tossing your baby
into space!?
Dark Matter is a river.
It flows across our sub-
conscious mind.
It is the sky of Nut;
the ether of Prufrock
— Plato’s dodecahedron.
You dream of terminal shock
while I chat to the wall clock
staring at the snow —
(17 below). I lift the lid
of my wood stove —
as above so below.
You do not go down in history,
you shoot into the unknown,
propelled into time immemorial
while I count minutes in logs
and you — rockets to space.
Captain’s Log: StarDate …
* 2 * 6 2 * 1 eight
who do we appreciate?
Ashes to ashes, dust to funky.
I watch the Falcon blow
live steam on my screen
and Musk chants — T minus Zero.
Qwynn, an illustrator for the last 25 years works for local, national and international clients. Recently she has begun writing her own books and is currently working on her first graphic novel. In 2017, Qwynn’s poem Via Cassini was included in Second Life®’s Poetry of the Planets event sponsored by the Linden Endowments of the Arts. This last February Qwynn participated in the month-long Virtual Writer’s PAD poetry challenge in the virtual world of Milk Wood, completing a series of poems drawn from her life in the wintry landscape of her Michigan home, and her fascination with the finite nature of our existence versus the limitlessness of outer space.
Judge’s Comments
“NO KITTY HAWK is a poem about one specific date, 02/06/2018, and one current event of that date: a huge event, a vast and expensive spectacle, much discussed, more reported, hard to ignore. But of what importance, placed in this context of ancient deity, timeless poetry, early philosophy? Simply, another blip in human history and, beyond that, the incomprehensible vastness of space, and the immediate need to survive winter’s cold.”
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Old Dog Walks By Raina Anatra
Our labyrinth
A narrow, dusty trail
Deepened by years
Each step
Rich and reminiscent
Sacred and slow
No hurry to reach the center point
Where we walk forward no more
Where this journey ends and another begins
Led by our shadows
We step willingly into
The great dark mystery
Of the moment ahead
A wet muzzle nudges my hand
Suggesting,
Reminding me
Of this moment’s potential
Of reward for no reason but joy
Of salty, meaty bits
That last a moment on the tongue
But stay with us forever.
Raina Anatra (aka Barbara Jacksha) is the author/creator of the Vision Pages series that includes Vision Pages for Creative Writers with Daring Dreams: a vision journal for imagining your dreams to life. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of publications, including Smokelong Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Summerset Review, Per Contra, Mad Hatter’s Review, and the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward. Barbara’s work has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She was also co-founder/co-editor of the literary journal Cezanne’s Carrot.
Poet’s Website | Amazon Author Page
Judge’s Comments
“Old Dog Walks is a poem that’s bigger than it is. It’s one dog walk, and it’s all the walks. It’s one love, and all the loves. Evoking the great with the small is one of the works of poetry, and is one element that makes this simple poem so strong.”
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La Belle au Bois Dormant by Susan Cossette
No man ever kissed me into life.
I awoke.
Clawed up, from under the pink briar roses —
After what felt like a hundred years
Of over-salted stilted holiday meals,
Boiled white potatoes and beans,
Soggy cod in clotted cream.
Your barbs still stick in my flesh,
Passive words of aggressive indifference,
Served over stale ginger Swedish cookies and tea.
Lost in a bland suburban day dream,
Stuffed head-first in a crystal coffin.
You never knew my eyes were never shut.
But I heard everything, I saw it all.
I could not speak,
Gagged, scratching these words on the damp glass.
Your needs, your needs,
Oh, all of your needs, scraping at me.
Mother, child, spouse.
I bleached my house.
I made it all clean.
I made my hands bleed.
I watched the hot sun,
The cold stars, the knowing moon,
They told me to keep going.
Beauty, it will all be over soon.
The jealous fairy’s curse will be broken.
You will, you will awaken.
You will be loved.
Susan’s sparse, wry poetry examines the struggle to preserve personal identity and integrity under the constraints of suburbia and mass-produced culture. Her work also explores the contemporary political landscape while striving to give voice to those who have been victimized.
She earned her B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Connecticut, where she studied with poets James Scully and Marilyn Nelson and was a two-time recipient of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, her work has appeared in Rust and Moth, Anti-Heroin Chic, Clockwise Cat, The Scarecrow Journal, and the Adelaide Literary Magazine (short-listed for Pushcart nomination), among others.
A 2017 transplant to the Twin Cities, Susan’s readings include Barnes and Noble (Stamford, CT), The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center (NY), Curley’s Poets (Stamford, CT) Writers Resist (Norwalk Community College), Confluencia (Palace Theater, Danbury CT), and most recently The Day of the Dead Poets Slam in Rochester, MN.
To pay the bills, Susan is Annual Fund and Communications Manager for Way to Grow in Minneapolis, a nonprofit organization committed to closing the educational gap among the Twin Cities’ most isolated families.
Judge’s Comments
“Fairytale has offered fertile ground for so many writers over the years. Playful retellings, reframing as social commentary, psychological studies, films and popular TV series, and of course poetry, all draw on the land of fairy and its familiar archetypes. This adaptation raises the question, what could there possibly be in the life of a Briar Rose, that would make a fairy jealous?”
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Warm thanks to Zoe Ocelot and Harri Gausman for judging this year’s competition.
