Award Winning Poetry

from our 2023 Poetry Contest

A Deterioration In Talks

A lone green tree standing in a demolished frontier // The sleeping animal huff of our own pried-open country // Time will not exonerate us // We are half-lit / godwit / complicit // We sigh ourselves into ever more fashionable pyres / try in vain to break our animal faces away from all this sudden immutable damage / coax a language for grief from the crushed-glass throat of the sea // Tranquilizers // Tourniquets // Triglycerides // Talismans of holy fear // Talismans of holy damage // Tear off our tender buttons // Tear off our tender buttons // Tear off our tender buttons // Will we ever find a comfortable darkness again? // Down the street the corpses of thousand horses burn like flowers in the stadium //

Adam Fell

Adam Fell is the author of Catastrophizer, winner of the 2022 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest, and two poetry collections, Dear Corporation (Forklift Books 2019) and I Am Not A Pioneer , winner of the 2011 Posner Poetry Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. An Associate Professor of English at Edgewood College in Madison, Fell is co-founder and curator of the Monsters of Poetry Reading Series.

Ambiguous Loss

We would talk of what was defined as tangible, rap the table with a knuckle, stroke the cashmere. Sip the tea. Fathers were not mentioned. Nor how my mother would call me by her sister’s name, suddenly, sometimes. He said he thought his sense of smell was lessening, and how to tell? Was it just age? I thought so or thought it best to say so. Some form of compassion was needed. He missed it: even burnt toast. He sat, looking off beyond my shoulder, at something I couldn’t see. There were never any letters, and even hastily signed cards stopped arriving years ago. We found ourselves on occasion wandering down city streets after heavy snow, before any clearing.

Kelly R. Samuels

Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections— Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press) and All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books)—and four chapbooks: Talking to Alice, To Marie Antoinette, from, Words Some of Us Rarely Use, and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, Sixth Finch and RHINO.

I Hate People Who Cut in Line But

I’ve been thinking about things that skip a step because now in late winter the snow does its subliming, jumpstarts to vapor, says to the streams “not today.”

I thought fog was clouds coming down but this, this is clouds disambiguating from the snow to rise like a gesture against the dark tree meaning “Scottish weather” or “curly hair.” Enoch and Elijah didn’t die. Some carts work fine without a horse. Early tenure. Half-court shot. You have to have cake before you eat it.

The high school students in my college class are so frighteningly smart. When my youth group leader tried to tell us her ex-fiancé had pressured her to have sex, she said, “He wanted the honeymoon before the wedding.” I’m not altogether sure I knew what she meant. She married someone else. They got divorced.

“Pandemic” precedes “panic” in the dictionary. Otherwise they do-si-do. Sometimes in nightmares I give up. I lie down and say “Just do it. Just kill me. Get it over with. Do it now.”

Marnie Bullock Dresser

Marnie Bullock Dresser lives in Spring Green, Wisconsin with her husband and son and three cats. She taught English at UW-Richland until the campus closed. In retirement, she is writing, writing, writing, and expanding her collection of washi tape, which she loves beyond all reason.