Fire Season: Super Perennial

“Fire Season: Super Perennial” by Jacqueline Lyons is the winner of the 2025 Nature Poetry Prize, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We’re honored to share this visceral poem with you.

“‘Fire Season: Super Perennial’ glows with the ache and possibilities of renewal—the kind of poem that believes in what can bloom back, even after a raging fire. This poem’s language opens up like petals made of ash, revealing grief braided with persistence. In its closing lines, we are made to feel that exquisite, impossible hope: the rare idea that even scorched ground remembers how to get back to green.” –Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Guest Judge

Acknowledge ‘drought’
Consider ‘rowed across the water’ ‘to that other shore’

Don’t say ‘should’
Don’t lie ‘everything for a reason’
Don’t glow ‘rebuilt and got our dreamhouse’ ceiling to floor windows
_____opening onto a cactus garden

Did the headline that read “Succulents Saved Their Home” end
_____with or without a question mark

Last night, distillations beneath a live oak’s canopy
_____a friend fantasizes a fire-proof dome over his house
Crassula along the fence absorb his carbon dioxide

In one dream, a rain shower in every room, matchbook rolled
_____into the hem of a yellow dress
fountain tumbling with smoke instead of water

Who said to make someone happy, take away everything they have
_____then give it all back

Your mother’s wishes–bury her ashes in the shade between
_____her parents and a sugar maple

She planted flowers every spring, mostly annuals, pansies and petunias
_____edged gardens with sempervivum, garlanded the house with tulips
and when she rowed back across the water in a dream
_____her sleeves held the scent of wild mint and lavender

What if everyone were three plants
_____an annual, a perennial, and a super-perennial
the plant we’re born as, the one shaped by winters
_____and the one—the dream didn’t say, implied
beyond pyrophytic, met on the other side.