We would like to say THANK YOU to everyone that submitted a manuscript this year. Here are the final results, announcing the winner, the finalists, and the semi-finalists. Finalists are indicated by an asterisk.
Winner: Tracey Emin’s Tent / Jake Bauer
*Peep / Danielle Blau
*Future Symptoms / A. Molotkov
Ghosts of the Permian Seas / Danielle Dubrasky
*Bees in the Fire / Fay Dillof
Still Life with White / Holly Karapetkova
Freak Lip: an Epistolary / Julia Cohen
*Into The The / Robin Reagler
Pair Trawl and Dredge / David Moody
Ticker / Mark Neely
If You Don’t Want to Bring the Body Into This / Donna Spruiit-Metz
green / Audrey Colasanti
*Philomel, Whose Reputation Precedes Her / Ashley Danielle Ryle
Man versus Bird / Paul-Victor Winters
Estuary / Jeremy Voigt
My National Anthem is an Elegy / Andrew Cox
Turkey Vulture / Zachary Lundgren
A Day at the Gene Pool / Jaimee Kuperman
How will the robots kill themselves / Jason Morphew
And the World Doesn’t End with Ashes and Flames but with Lack / Jade Ramsey
Flowers as Mind Control / Laura Minor
Swiitch / Freesia McKee
Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years / Peter Grandbois
Last Known Address / Jane Medved
The Dream Protects the Dreamer / Ryan Teitman
Arrangements in a System of Pointing / Matt McBride
Everything is Liquid / Sharon White
Portable City / Karen Kovacik
*Oops Sorry I / Wes Civilz
The Pocket Oracle / Sharon Dolin
The Great Outdoors / Joshua Corey
Means to be Lucky / Annie Kantar
*Empty Book / Emma Winsor Wood
*Preferred Internal Landscape / Emma Winsor Wood
*The Johnson Poems Heart Attack Geological Survey / John Whalen
*Liam Powell / No Action Alternative
Gestures / Joshua Boettiger
Stephen Priest / To Find Comfort in Others
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Jake Bauer is the author of the chapbook Big Pool, Oh (Factory Hollow Press, 2021) and co-author of the chapbook Idaho Falls (SurVision Books, 2019). Winner of Phoebe’s Greg Grummer Poetry Contest for his poem “Machine,” his work has also recently appeared in The Laurel Review, Third Coast, Gulf Coast, LIT and more. Having earned his MFA from The Ohio State University, he now serves as the Marketing Director for Saturnalia Books and lives in Traverse City, MI.
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THE METHOD ACTOR
When I was younger, I was confused
each winter when suddenly the world
was not green. I had been taught things
are what they are— We call this a chair
because it’s a chair. We call this
a trillium because it’s a trillium.
But when they said without doubt
that this is the world, even though
it was frigid and white
and sometimes we could not
even drive on what they still called roads,
it was obvious to me this was not
the world. And when they said you
are Godfrey, but then one day
I was a half-man, gawky
and whiskered, how could I
trust anything? At first,
I was ashamed. But, thankfully,
the subsequent thought:
I could be the trillium.
So when I shivered in the wind
and in winter when I disappeared,
I was. And: I could be the chair—
some people sat on me, some
chucked me across the room
when they were mad, and
some decorated me with jewels. Then,
what always happens happened
to me, too— people wanted to pay me
because I had discovered something
true about existence. And I took
their money, though often it was not money.
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