GRAND PRIZE WINNER

Fire
by Julia Levine

The horse knows the sky is bitter with ash;
you can see the tremble in his graze,
how he startles his forelegs against the trough
before dipping down to water.
But horses know nothing of regret,

of the vast distance between this fire
burning down the hills and my brother
jumping the creek with me to crouch in thistles,
launching sparks over the railroad ties
into farmland, embers lifting like a seeded light.

How close to sin I was then,
the missed lick of flame that might have drawn
a farmer to the paddock, his face ruddy with heat
and terror, slapping cows apart, standing back
as animals thundered down the stalls.  Now

the horse shadows me as I walk the fenceline,
the way the past keeps us in sight as we move ahead,
and I remember my father groaning as he bends
to the swastika singed into our lawn, rubs his eyes
with a handkerchief.  And later when he enters

with a boy I barely know, I listen at the study door.
In one hand, my father holds a glass of water.
He is drawing his other hand across a map
of the Russian Pale
into the complicated geography of exile.

He wants the boy to understand prayer
as water filling any shape that is offered,
and that fire, though it begins with so little,

must finally, ask for everything.

RUNNERS-UP

1st          Kat Mandeville :  Orpheus

2nd        Alina Stefanescu:  About Last Night (and the Others)

3rd        Joanne Hayes:  First Husband

FINALISTS

Alina Stefanescy  –  Children I

Cheryl Suma  –   Walking Boys

Claire Kelley  –  Ovation

Colette Gill  –  The Black-Crowned Loop

Deborah Schupack  –  School Shooting #68 and Counting

FJ Bergmann –  Dispersion

Franny French  –  Calling up the Ancestors,

Jennifer Hollis  –  One Way to Disappear

Joanne Hayes I –  Hang Wash

Joyce Schmid  –  Pieta

Karen Lynch  –  Seventeen

Katherine Menjivar – Adulting: As The Stethoscope Readings Of A Shy Being

Kat Mandeville: Orpheus

Kathleen O’Toole  –  Alert

Kim Garcia  –  A pheasant’s burbling call

Kim Garcia  –  Flat White

Kristina McDonald  –  Never Enough

Laniesha Brown  – Half Honey

Leticia Urieta  –  The Graveyard of Good Health

Marianne Mersereau  –  Pilgrim Dance

Pamela Summers  –  Long Division

Philip Sharp  –  hone-tatemae

Quentin Rynbrandt  –  Prodigal

Sandi Stromberg  –  The Pianist’s Gift

Susan Gundlach – Reverberations from the Parkland Shootings

Sherry Hanson  –  Ecclesiastes

Stephen Toskar – Sandalwood Burning on the River

Tricia Bauer  –  What Matters

Zoë Johnson   –  On trauma

Zoë Johnson  –  Where I’m From