Aubade

“Aubade” by Eva Mary Hooker is the winner of the 2025-26 Rejected Poetry Prize, selected by Mai Der Vang. We’re honored to share this beautiful poem with you.

“‘Seemingly delicate and wonderfully elusive, this poem harnesses the linguistic mysteries inherent in poetry while leaping toward an unsettled condition of desire. Enacted here is a want for the nectar of language, for a precisioned musicality that echoes in the ear, and for a wild tenderness in moments of ‘grace against which I need not clothe myself.’ Longing becomes movement and reflection as embodied in the performance of a cellist. Even as the poem finishes on the promise of more, I love that I’m left in a place of mystical abandonment to ponder and draw connections between the speaker’s state of mind and whatever might arrive or depart in the early aubade hours.”

–Mai Der Vang, Guest Judge

---

__________________I want augury and honeycomb

words that tilt into swooning sound, like that of the cellist

as her back lifts, then rounds—

 

__________________She is terebinth

and spreads her branches makes a wideness, liquid bone,

grace against which I need not clothe myself—

 

__________________Simply accept the sway of her sweetness—

cassia and camel’s thorn—allow her root and labor—provident

place of first fruit—:   And lo!

                                               

__________________My canal of fathoming:  my compass

north south east and west I hear her voice in my ear

: : sotto voce  : :  if you speak you will stammer : : sotto voce : :

 

__________________Margins can perish

I did not know then the smell of wilderness, its odor, the way its mouth

opens and shuts like the eye of a waxed doll

 

__________________I could make of its presence only this:

ark that is covenant that is law that is place where I stumble and fall

urgently still into her arms.

 

__________________Softly, softly, she says: I will give you

more than you ask.

 

 

 

Line 10 is from Emily Dickinson’s Letter 554.