Poetry
Winner: Ignite by Daniel Lurie

From a wellspring of great choices I have selected “Ignite” by Daniel Lurie as the winner of Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art’s Spring Contest. With its 14-line structure and sonic richness (long/claw, tail/trail, evidence/silence, sloshes/slashes etc.) “Ignite” manages to be both compressed and lush. I love a poem that opens with the authority of a quirky declaration, and this first line, “There’s nothing as lonely as the long claw of a train horn,” expresses a declarative truth. If you’ve heard a train horn at night in the middle of nowhere, you know that specific brand of loneliness. From that anchor, the poem takes a leap into deeper strangeness, with a boxcar full of spotted loons and their faltering wail, and the next boxcar which “cracks open / and my mother’s voice praying for it to end fills the valley.” What is this “it”? I am not sure. The train’s horn? The night? Her life? All of the above? I can endure that mystery. The speaker, we learn, has hitched a ride on the train, which seems to be both animal and machine, with its claw, its tail, its voices, and now the speaker, both the container and witness of the night. Even the bones of skinny kids in the alfalfa field, spinning as they look up at the stars, “rattle like snakes.” The last image, with the speaker striking a match against their teeth and setting fire to the coal car, ignites the train, the prairie, and the poem. What could be more apt, in a poem seeded with images of presence and disappearance, than immolation, and “Embers scrap[ing] at the prairie with their fingernails”? With its keen crafting, which nonetheless does not call too much attention to itself, “Ignite” ignites the lyric imagination.
—Diane Seuss

Nonfiction
Winner: Yellow by T.C. Martin

Its stress-heavy sentences and associative structure pulled me in. From the yellow squares of Splenda packets to the nostalgic, golden glow of McDonald’s arches to the “garish and fruity” plaid shirt hiding the “too-yellow insides threatening to spill out,” the narrator’s obsession with yellow became suspenseful. Ultimately, though, the vulnerability—the exploration of how one’s sexuality and size has led to parental disappointment—elevated artful prose into a deeply affecting literary work. “Yellow” is exquisitely constructed, landing somewhere between nonfiction and poetry. I can’t stop thinking about it.
—Jeannie Vanasco

Fiction
Winner: Your Mouth Gets Well by Lane Michael Stanley

“Your Mouth Gets Well,” takes an unconventional look at the messy, often hilarious lengths one individual goes to as he navigates the complexities of sobriety alongside a motley group of characters. Dean, our story’s narrator, a “semi-hairy short round middle-aged fag with adult acne,” is acerbic and engaging in all the right ways. This voice is searing yet tender, offering up a unique, unvarnished look at addiction, recovery, desire, and redemption.
—Alex Espinoza