Category: Contests

I’m glad my grandma died before she could see me get fat

Bleah Patterson 2024 Poetry Spring Contest Runner Up  because she taught me butter, sauté all of the butter     add all of the sugar         stir in all...

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Teacher Bird: or Meditations on Phoebe

Alison Granucci When out of the great cosmos of all creation a bird arrives as the new shape of your mother returning from the dead, tell me, what does it not have to teach about the nature...

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In Martinsville (2021)

Chanlee Luu a church on nearly every block: Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Evangelical. She doesn’t know the difference; what she does remember is the Bible quotes inserted—editing...

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Robert de Niro

Phoebe Phelps I fell in love when I was twenty-nine and he was thirty-two, a respectable age difference. Preferable, actually, because they say men mature more slowly than women. And just in time...

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Discount Tobacco, Cold Beer Cave

Samuel Ellington And the barn on my left reads get right with God. There’s a gravel-road token that we can make home. Cut grass, gasoline, and I laughed when they told me the Lord is three...

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Sometimes he calls out for Baby. Sometimes Baby runs

Sara Burge down our street screaming, his voice chasing like a pissy wasp. Sometimes he’s an Apache helicopter. Sometimes Baby’s a mouse on a rug. Sometimes their fights are a riff on last...

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Blood Relative

Cassie Flint Fancher After three days at sea eating fried food and on-demand ice cream, velcroing seasickness bracelets to our wrists, and wiping our lips on towels folded like swans, my mother...

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self-portrait with three hands

p. hodges adams 2024 Poetry Spring Contest Winner the first hand had square knuckles, like a boy;  the second hand could hold a teacup neatly; the third hand was furious. i’m getting ahead of...

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Here it is

Jane Feinsod where the head splits  open and a goat crawls out. Like it knows something. Takes a tongue to water. Pisses toward Nebraska. Curls into a bushel of honeysuckle. Suspects nothing,...

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Field Notes on Being

Rebecca Bernard They agree to meet on instant messenger at midnight. He’s usually on AIM at that hour, gifted with a computer in his bedroom, but she must sneak to the family computer, mute the...

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