Daniel Lurie
2026 Poetry Spring Contest Winner
There’s nothing as lonely as the long claw of a train horn.
Like a tail, three boxcars trail in its wake, the first stuffed
with spotted loons picks up where the horn leaves off,
when they falter, the second boxcar cracks open
and my mother’s voice praying for it to end fills the valley.
I know this because I’ve hitched a ride, letting the bucket
of my ribcage hold the slosh of night. The lonely thing
about a train is it’s always departing, leaving little evidence
it was ever there except for the blood orange rind of silence.
It slashes through alfalfa fields filled with skinny children
star-tipping, their bones rattle like bands of snakes.
They don’t notice the train burrow into elsewhere, so I strike
my last match against my teeth, let it fall to the car swollen
with coal. Embers scrape at the prairie with their fingernails.
Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer, from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Daniel is co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal and a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and others. He recently won the 2026 Mississippi Review Prize, was awarded the Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellowship from UW-Madison, and will serve as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford in 2026-2028. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com.