2023 adult winners

“Holiday”
By Caroline Jennings

No one wants to hear that you lifted her
as gently as you knew how onto the chair
set in the tub, and that she was already shivering
from cold, from shame, from sheer exhaustion

even though you had found the old milk-house heater
that heats clean and hot unlike those newer ones
and turned it up with the door shut half an hour before.
No one would want to imagine her weak and trembling

nor would you want them to, for then they
could also imagine her as she began to weep
and they would see her frail, plucked body
turning in upon itself in hopelessness, and you,

they would see how you could not keep your eye
from her worrying hand that no longer knew
what to grasp or how and so sought something invisible in the air,
would read how it was all that you could do

not to bang your head against the tub and weep
right with her, or else to smother every part of her
in frantic kisses, thinking they might be the one thing
she would understand and possibly forgive.

No, the truth is not the desired or polite reply
to such a simple question: how was your holiday?
And yet the anticipated, bold-faced lie
Is now too big a betrayal. So you stop short

and say the feeble, truly meaningless thing,
that it was hard but you were glad to help,
all the while each tiny dissolution repeating in your mind
but in reverse, to reconstruct her unremembered life.

 

“The Unheard”
By Barbara Ann Lemoine

The moth in your mouth
flutters her fragile wings,
leaving grey dust against
tongue, teeth, palate.

Mouth open,
words drying
before they make sound,
make sense.

Sit in silence.
Breathe.
Unuttered syllables
the only words.

The moth at peace.
An open cave.

 

“The Magpie”
By Danielle Adams

There is a place in the forest
where the magpie went to die.
He rested his wings upon the leaves
and felt the breeze.

He heard the sound of a roar,
almost like the sound of water
rushing past, he felt the beat
of the earth, a vibration of atoms
unfurling.

He saw a cave deep within,
a spiral of light,
he remembered what it was like
to first take flight.

He remembered his mother’s song,
the way that the sky looked at
dawn.

He remembered until there was no
‘him’ to see,
when the light became night
and the forest continued its
scene, as the deer laid in pairs
and the wolves howled,
and the mycelium grew –

A network of becoming.
The faint sound of humming
and rain.

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