A SYSTEM OF EQUATIONS WITH ■ AS PROXY
“■² opens me up to dine w/ wolves, ■³ is a phlebotomist ■⁴ a carnivorous flower / any further ■’s are ≥ gods”
Contest Winner
by the pond
By Thomas Guo
“our names pierced through the pond’s surface tension / now fortified by the backs of algae.”
The Angel Runs for Office
“the angel spends / his afternoons, ears pressed to the dirt, cataloging their theologies.”
2025 Palette Poetry Prize: Winners & Finalists
Please join us in congratulating these incredible poets. Winners were selected by Palette’s editors.
Somewhere Light
By Svetlana Sterlin & Rae White
“dormant injury flares fluorescence through insomnia / am I nothing but cat reclined in day’s fading sunbeam?”
Catalogues of a Space Telescope around Boy Crushes, in 5 stages of Grief
By Charlie Wei
“There’s something elliptic about the way love dies in this compound: in west / wing, a college girl stacks another freshly killed into her ex’s jewelry box.”
Fire Season: Super Perennial
“in one dream, a rain shower in every room, matchbook tucked / into the hem of a yellow dress / fountain tumbling with smoke instead of water,”
False Aubade
By Lisa Compo
“Night collapsed into day. Silence fell, / somewhere a new dimension grew.”
Texas, May 1999
By Sylvia Fox
“Here I kiss the peach fuzz undersides of dandelion leaves, / of sharp-edged thistle for the tingle left behind, / my mouth a new land too”