Winning Poems

Dwarf Form

Winner: Down in the Valley, by Kate Boyes

...doomsday comes, goes. Meh.
But here above treeline snow’s
cleaner now, vultures
fatter, and I’ve stopped checking
for monsters under my bed.

Judge's Comments

This post-apocalyptic poem’s blasé tone and understated message really caught my attention. After doomsday, might things actually be better? For this speaker, they seem to be. This really made me think about what kind of life the speaker had that had driven them away from civilization and caused them to treat the eschatological as a positive. I also rather enjoyed the expert use of enjambment in such a short work.

Second Place: Untitled by F.J. Bergmann

bound with plaited grass
a stack of cicada husks
for the fairy armorer

Judge's Comments

The imagery in this poem stayed with me long after I finished reading all the entries. cicada husks as fairy armor? Perfect. Especially with this year’s cicada blast on the East coast and Midwest, this felt wonderfully timely and funny. I was delighted to find so much evocation in such a tight work, the ennui of retreating cicada hordes…the hint of secret fairy worlds.

Third Place: In Praise of Afro-Cosmicism, by Joy Donnell

Should I shrink? At unknown’s brink?
The cosmic horror I’ve known is colonial.
Eyes skyward, dreaming too vast to think
at unknown’s brink, I should shrink.
Sublime is gateless space—my open fields link
since, present world cages me in caste carceral.
Why should I shrink at Unknown’s brink?
All cosmic horror I’ve known is imperial.

Judge's Comments

I loved reading this. The subject matter was well paired, ironically, by the use of form to help ask the question—is formal poetry colonial? It was fun to read out loud, as well.

Short Form

Winner: Feeding Their Daughters, by Helen Patrice

Crush women down:
oak doors, with heavy stones.
They sink, buried or not,
feed the forest.

A web underground,
mothers dendriting knowledge
through spore, seed, humus.
Every apple, wild strawberry,
plucked cherry
feeds new generations.

Fungi woodwives,
mycellium mothers.

We are the witches you burned, Witchfinders.
We fed on bones, ashes,
the fruiting bodies of our grandmothers.
Those you killed live on
in the bellies of your daughters.

Judge's Comments

This thoughtful, haunting poem evokes hidden dangers using vivid and oppressive imagery of violence against women. This cycle of death and decay nurturing the earth to produce fruits of the forest and fungi parallels how this historical violence feeds the determination of future generations of daughters.

Second Place: Making Vinegar in Struggletown, by M.C. Childs

Skipping Girl Vinegar Co. Sign, Melbourne, Australia

Hum of neon. In the unruffled air before the inhale of day, everyone sleeps except the patrol patrolling, skipping girl skipping. The click of the switch turns her neon red rope – back, top, front, skip,....

Skipping girl, vinegar girl, spin around.

Time, cosmologists posit, is a product of entanglement.
Perhaps we are cousins to a city of angels, a city of roses, a city of rope jumpers.

Skipping girl, vinegar girl, say your prayers.

Her framework frames the stars. Jupiter is in Taurus. Pegasus overhead.
Her framework hosts pigeons. They coo counterpoint.

Oh skipping girl, skipping girl, never touch the ground.

Great red neon ropes of space-time swing around the universe – top, front, skip, back,....
counting out rhythm, spinning out spirit, telling stories, keeping time.

Vinegar girl, vinegar girl, play musical chairs.

At 6 AM the Struggletown Tram grumbles down
Victoria Street carrying morning to the 21^st century vinegar factories.

Vinegar girl, oh vinegar girl, stand upright.

At 6 PM the St. Kilda tram grumbles,
the Box Hill tram mumbles stories of home.

Skipping girl, skipping girl, don’t turn out your light.

Back, top, front, skip,
back, top, front, skip,....

Salt, vinegar, mustard, pepper. If you dare, you can do better.

Judge's Comments

I loved the wordplay and cadences in this poem. The writer has an obvious love of language! There is a childlike song-type element to the poem that keeps it playful with a nursery rhyme cadence that juxtaposes in an interesting way with the elevated themes of time and celestial bodies, to finally bring the focus back down to earth and the mundane world of trams and vinegar factories.

Third Place: The Light Phenomena, by Vinita Agrawal

Our body, a universe  
waiting for the strike  
that ignites stars.
A flash of light
at the moment of fertilisation 
an egg with a sperm
causing zinc ions to sparkle.
No vows, no rings,
no trembling hands,  
just fierce chemistry—
lit-up atoms leaping  
like tiny supernovae.
This is how creation begins—  
with a glow,  
a brilliance so brief,
even a microscope could miss it.  
The smallest fire
birthing life in a womb. 
Is the explosion of light
at conception, why we look for
something luminous to guide us after death?
The swollen match 
of light, its ghost 
still burning 
behind our ribs.  
In the end, 
when the body unspools  
into silence,  
we veer toward the tunnel 
of white illumination.
Our throat’s bright corridors
eager to blend into eternal light.
Lambency, our oldest script;
one we could read blindfolded.

Note: Science has discovered that light is produced during fertilization due to a burst of zinc ions released by the egg, which triggers biochemical reactions that emit photons.

Judge's Comments

Fascinating subject matter! This is an interesting and deft way to describe scientific processes in poetic, lyrical language. I also liked how the poem uses the extended metaphor of light being related to the existence of the human soul, how the “flash of light” during fertilization might represent the spark of creating a new human being, which carries through to the “tunnel of white illumination” that has been described by people who’ve been revived after a “near-death” experience. I found “when the body unspools into silence” a very arresting image, and totally apart from the rest of the light-based imagery that is woven throughout this piece.

Long Form

Winner: irish weather, by Quinn Young

(To preserve formatting, this piece is embedded as a PDF. On mobile devices, you may have to download the file to view the poem.)

Judge's Comments

This poem combined lovely lyric language and strong imagery. I was also interested in the interwoven strong scientific concepts. The experimental, concrete form and cut-off words, to me, indicate the horror of the concepts of radiation and other damage to the land and people.

Second Place: From Out The Jaded Sky, by Alan Ira Gordon

It used to be An Event.
The spotting of the rare aerial
disk, triangle or cigar-shape.
With such beautiful lights, surrounding
a strong shaft of tractor beam.

And the crashes. Oh, those crashes,
so rarified and exciting! At Roswell,
on the outskirts of Phoenix
and up in New Hampshire.
The detritus at the end of an untold
light year’s journey.

It’s not the same anymore.
With the crashes now so commonplace.
Seems every country-mile has
it’s crash site. Scorched-earth tableaus
of broken particle accelerators.
Shattered navigation consoles and hull
fragments. Even scattered varieties
of alien candy wrappers.

Social Media chatters with the constancy
of the crashes. “Unidentified Failing
Objects,” the bloggers call’em.

Reddit posters thread Theories Of Why:
a declining quality of vehicle design;
climate change weather disruptions;
some secret government weapons
program pulling ’em down.

But I know the real reason. No proof
of it but feel it in my bones.
They watched us for generations.
And they didn’t expect to, but…
they grew to love us. And more
importantly, came to love
this Earth…this gorgeous world.

Then we butchered it. With our internecine
wars, terrorisms and daily brutalities.
And of course, the humanity-designed
climate change and environmental
disasters.

I think they’re a refined and sensitive
race, delicate with empathy and just
plain decency. So given the atrocities
we’ve done to ourselves and the planet?
We came to deeply disappoint them.
To the point where they just couldn’t take
it anymore.

They had such hopes that we’d be kindred
spirits. Evolve to join’em in the stars.
But it’s clear now that we’re not worthy,
we just don’t have it in us, never will.
And that realization just hurts them
too much to limp back home and live
with it. Alone.

So ship-by-ship. They’re turning-off
the anti-gravity lifts. Cutting the warp-
drive engines and offing the power.
Then shattering-down into the unforgiving
earth from which they’d hoped
we’d rise.

Maybe it’s a gift, of sorts. A last-ditch
reach/hard slap-across-humanity’s
-collective face. This suicidal send-off
wake-up call, to snap us into collective
awareness that we’re at the ultimate cusp:
if we can hurt the world to the trigger
point of alien self-destruction, what chance
do we have to make it?

I like to think that’s the cause of this grand
fall, a tragic gift of self-sacrifice
on our primitive behalf. But again…
that feeling in my aging bones.
There’s no grand cause, here.
Our hurtfulness just plain reached-out
and damaged the stars.

In the face of the God-given Universe.
We just might not be worth it.

In Memory of Bruce Boston (1943-2024)

Judge's Comments

Lovely writing, lyrical futuristic imaginings. I was particularly fascinated by this unique theory posed by this poem to explain the plethora of reported crashes as a being a result of the pathos, ennui, and general disappointment that extraterrestrial visitors are having with the progress of humanity.

Third Place: terraforming, by Clarabelle Miray Fields

the children will undertake it easily
with little hands,
joyful in their innocence
of the fault of their forebearers,
the selfish men and oligarchs
that made this necessary,
the struggle that
to them still seems like play,
a fresh canvas
of sweeping martian snow
and desert dust and valleys
and untouched mountains that glimmer
with visions of possible imaginings,
groups of them
breaking baby roads in the rusted dirt
with eager shovels, pails empty,
piling martian mud and random rocks
into newly-christened castles
for child-kings,
temporary royalty
waging war on each other,
carrying out centuries’ worth
of pretend battles in movements
soon erased by shifting winds:
wild races to the top of unconquered lookouts
and afternoon sieges,
tenuous treaties
that they hold until dinnertime
or the invention of another game,
perhaps drawing hopscotch in mars-dust
or planting gardens of rocks
in the falling shade,
blissfully unaware that they are
the artificers of the future
tilling the empty soil
with the seeds of their history,
moving rocks one by one,
laying the framework for where
walls will one day be,
roads blooming from the spokes of the deer trails
that they tread between their parents’ life-pods
and these makeshift playgrounds,
habits that will one day be highways,
city lights consecrating what long ago
was to them just a happenstance journey home,
falling together, arm-in-arm,
over their growing feet,
searching for rocks
that glitter just right
in the lavender twilight,
precious currency for tomorrow’s game.
one day they will fight in real battles,
these happy child-kings,
friends turning friends into enemies,
their fate known only to the secretive, red-tinged wind
that blows their footprints silently away
in the dust.

Judge's Comments

This poem provides an interesting take on solarpunk futurism, a subject that I’m currently interested in. The imagery relating to terraforming in this particular poem caught my attention, especially how the poem compares the act of terraforming to the simple acts of children in the same way that the kings and leaders of the world act like children themselves.

Honorable Mentions

Dwarf Form

After Dark, by F. J. Bergman

Short Form

Flight on All Hallows’ Eve, by Vince Gotera

Long Form

Waiting for the Flames to Come, by F. J. Bergmann

Gaea Pleads with Uranus and Astronauts, by Salvatore Roseo