Wave
“From above, everything looks delicate. / From above, / it looks like love: the light, / the peach cheek of the flower,”
Blog
2025-26 Rejected Poetry Prize: Winners & Finalists
Please join us in congratulating these remarkable poets. Winners were selected by Mai Der Vang.
Bellbird vernacular
By Alisha Brown
“I tell it to the ducks, who have / no dialect beyond the lightness // of their bodies.”
singing → nobody supposed to be here up (↑↑) & down (↓↓) the elevator in my building
By Trace DePass
“born decrepit in my subject position quest / (←)ion, marked, punctuated. i swing from it. i wrote it / backwards, start penultimate, i’m par [← achuting,”
Cain’s Wife On The Fifth Day Of Rain
“In the morning worms rise / slick from the earth. / They haven’t seen the sun / since you drove your brother’s name / into dirt.”
Birds of Paradise
“Heaven is waiting: a pair of snow / leopards guard the entrance in sculpted marble and obsidian, each coiled round the other, muscles / tensed and ready. I open the door.”
The Invisible Hand
By Felix Eshiet
“the fair boy says he’s been peeling since manhood stripped him of innocence, but that’s not a / grief solvent enough to dissolve his whole”
This Suburban Child Yearns for a Stereotypical Post-Apocalyptic World Overgrown with Weeds
By Hanwen Zhang
“the heaving of cyanobacteria / blooms in steaming lakes / no less bustling with life / than a field of dandelions”
The name you were given and the one you are known by
“A coyote tells secrets to the hemisphere / of my mind that cannot speak. It is busy shuffling / scene after scene of each girl I’ve been.”