Open to All poets

All Poems are to be submitted via Submittable.

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Judge 2026-January Gill O’Neil 

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Winners 2025

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From the Judge, Brendan Walsh

“It was intimidating to select only a few poems for recognition from this crop of hundreds of beautiful pieces (this was about 1,000 poems!). It’s an honor to select works for the namesake prize of one of my great poetry mentors, Vivian Shipley, and I’m sure that everyone who submitted would make Vivian proud.

I am wowed and humbled by the quality of fine poets in our midst, and I urge every person who submitted to continue writing, working, and carving your ideas and experiences into image and sound.”

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FIRST PLACE: By Jennifer Tubbs (Lubbock, Texas)

How to Write a Nature Poem

for Georgia O’Keeffe

the blue pebble eye of a painted devil crayfish appraises me from the shallows // mintleaf
beebalm breezes over miniature golden suns beach heath tucked into sand dunes // still I wonder
at the thingy-ness of life / every day a new genus // today the eastern carpenter bee velvets the
underbellies of sweetbay magnolias // tomorrow his brother / the buff-tailed bumblebee will visit
my merlin blue morns / rump plunging between style and stamen // Georgia / I think I could
spend my whole life writing a nature poem and never be done // you once said / In a way, nobody
sees a flower, really—it is so small / we haven’t time // by which you meant we are easily
tempted away from beauty // still / you painted your desert-cleaned skulls and pink pistons
among sagebrush and silver cholla // in the fading firefly hours down by the creek / I try to teach
myself // to see takes time like to have a friend takes time / you said // for a long time / I wanted
the sweet crease between dusk and dawn / always // I wanted to climb your ladder to the moon
and look over those I loved from a safe star’s distance // I wanted death with the same vigor you
sought to share the blossoming of life in the desert // it never occurred to you that skulls
reminded people of death // I have enjoyed them very much in relation to the sky // you were a
woman who knew how to see the white tafone of cow pelvis as an aperture to the heavens /
which is to say light can never be captured / only translated // still / notice the small world below
/ persisting // Santa Fe is a tourist town now / French-tipped nails exchanging hundred-dollar
bills / for river-rock turquoise / but still / notice the small world / below / persisting / rose
pincushion / prickly pear / amaranthine blooms / asphalt warbling / under / summer sun / get
down on your knees / count a crown / of twelve-petaled eyes / staring back / kismet / of stamens /
pray //

Judge’s Comments
“This densely-lined poem overflows with the ‘thingyness’ of life and the writhing world of color and movement we often ignore. The poet demands our attention with vibrant imagery and the ecstatic quiet we feel once we genuflect and praise the swimming, swirling, life among, beneath us, and before us.”

About Jennifer Tubbs
Jennifer Tubbs is a writer and PhD candidate whose work focuses on the nexus between womanhood and the environment. She has taught English internationally in Hyderabad, India, and Santiago, Chile. Her work can be found in Palette Poetry, CutBank, and elsewhere. Jennifer is currently in Ireland on a Fulbright grant, conducting archival and ethnobotanical research for her upcoming book, a genre-bending collection that grapples with generational trauma, gendered violence, and language eradication as a result of colonization.

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SECOND PLACE: Ian Hall (Tallahassee, Florida)

A Country Horse-Doctor

It’s the peregrine hour when all those who the day
demands something from are bracing
for it. At the pharmacy counter, the constable’s tie is already
argyled in sausage gravy. & there’s a liquor smirch
on the trifling briefs the magistrate didn’t get
around to last night (but hellfire he will still
adjudicate them come petty claims court). Snow is on the ground
maggot-white, & the shop windows are chintzy
with sleet. But still there is this tumbleweeding

of the heart. If our county were any bigger
than a sitcom set, they would all herd lemminglike into the rough
spun monochrome of gas stations, outlet malls, & plyboard huts
where you can rent VHS tapes
rewound by mice & silverfish. Instead
most are at home, huddled up against the anachronism
of a woodstove, losing the staring match
to their oatmeal. But I don’t have much
in the way of pathos for them. I was dogged

out of a dream hours ago by a man who said he’d blueblacked
his shins wading in a nightshirt through two miles of January
to the handiest phone. His Walking Horse
was in a pitiable way. So, jaw set, I went. I did a siege
time defrost—just cleared a murderhole’s worth
of sight—& within a cigarette I was dreaming again about the white
flour of my wife’s thighs, the dark between them
warm as fission. But my tires went over the municipal salt
like someone eating ice, & it made me stay

froggy. I held fast through the long gray caterwaul. They were gathered
hat-in-hand mournful around the horses’ shanty. Greetingless, I saw
to its teeth, breast & rearmost quarter. But nowhere could I
find anything gone sideward—the horse just lagged there, stalactites
of cold coming off its nostrils, chuffing
raw cosmos. I asked what the matter was. They pussyfooted.
One finally said we think she ate a pint bottle. I looked at them
like that was routine. You think? Why, another said, Jasper there
tuckered over in its stall around 10 with a glass pint in his shirtpocket
& when I came up on him it wasn’t nowhere findable. The third man,
Jasper, I wagered, had some mortifications on his face & was less
a canine from getting the everloving piss clapped out of him. So
there he mooned, altogether woo-woo from their unchurched
amends. Well, you all’ll have to watch her over this next day & see
if she grubs like usual & if her bowels are moving. It’s kindly strange
that she’d pay any mind to a glass bottle, let alone swallow it. But
if she did there’ll be an obstruction & that can get vicious. Odds are
your pint will turn up. Those three just stared at me—men so beggared

that citified ducks would throw bread at them—until one said
we’d rather you just go ahead & dig around after it. They were trigger
happy. & I knew if I didn’t do the doctoring myself, they would
vivisect the poor thing. My toolkit, frosted through, made an accordion
yap coming open. But the horse didn’t shy or quail when I came
with the needle, the fluid stupor. & in the quell before
insentience, its face was a plaster ruin. I wanted to ease into her
with diplomacy, not parse her guts like they were so much

paperwork. So for a grizzly while, I was ungloved & civil-fingered—
the three men piled behind me in skunk-breathed expectance. &, as is
wont for farce, I found it there at the mouth of the wombholler: a waxy
bottle. I couldn’t believe how smartly it was wedged, swaddled
in hormones, so there was no mutiny among the organs. Fairytale
snug, I didn’t even want to take the forceps to it. But I did, &
salved & gauzed her shut. She slept like a newlywed. I gave
the men the pint, tinseled in afterbirth, & they made Christmas
faces—it was mostway full. They each took out a novelty

shot glass & poured it brim-high. This was too intimate
to watch, like seeing someone honor a Do Not
Resuscitate, so I turned to leave, knowing they hadn’t any means
of paying up. But, wordless, to me

they tithed those first three shots. What can a man do
but slug them down, shake their hands? I stepped
out into the morning ruthlessly
lucid.

Judge’s Comments:
“Unbelievable lines and attention to image. This poet is a wildly talented and brilliant
storyteller of place.”

About Ian Hall
Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. He is currently a PhD candidate in Poetry at Florida State University. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, American Literary Review, and elsewhere.

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THIRD PLACE: Laney Nielson (Brookline, Massachusetts)

Silage

By August, the golden rods arched over,
their tasseled yellow tips touching
the ground; they knew their fate, how
it would be swift— the farmer from down
the road, a borrowed wind rower buzzing
as it slices the alfalfa & purple clovers,
the vetches & yarrows too, leaving
a brittle wake. The grassy air heavy
with what once was. Remember—
the two of us, our sun chapped lips,
the quilt, when you laid it down, you
were careful to not crush the Queen
Anne’s lace, my eyes on the black beetle
climbing the milkweed’s stalk, each
millimeter, a mile, my hand on your thigh.
In the end, everything—the balding dandelions,
us, all we yearn for, this day too will be cut,
rolled into bales, swept away and turned to silage.

Judge’s Comments
“Quiet, concise, and confident.”

About Laney Nielson
Laney Nielson is a poet and fiction writer in the Boston area. She’s published one middle grade novel and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sweet Lit and The Tusculum Review. Her short fiction was named a semifinalist in the 2021 Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story and was long-listed for the 2021 CRAFT’s flash fiction contest. She was the inaugural recipient of the Cynthia Leitich Smith Mentorship.

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HONORABLE MENTIONS

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Summer Moon
by Lindsey Warren (Wilmington, Delaware)

You see me pick
parsley out of my teeth,
and you know
all I want is,
all I want is
*
I thought I
was making
that silence,
but I looked up
and there you were
*
Can what has been born
be eternal,
like your persistence through
this sky that keeps changing
*
Oh,
the streetlight, too,
sees you always
for the first time
*
A circle
is perfect
when it returns to itself.
Light
eats the ivy.
I have to write this
over again

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A Meeting at the Edge of the Wood
by Jane Frazier (Jefferson City, Missouri)

only the sound of a finger of wind
three deer at the lake park
one with antlers half grown
his crown of the forest
one she one young follower just lost its spots
how they trek through the brush
by the trees and do not mind
my presence
these citizens of the woods and stars
how rare to touch their story
and see their oak brown eyes
taking in the world wonder by wonder
and when the trees have taken them
back in with tender arms
they will nuzzle the dripping emerald leaves
I will not see what the moon sees
when she looks down on them tonight
her light will play upon their flanks
as they softly walk in grasses
kingdom of the cricket
she long ago decided
that they were her children

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The Forgotten Stone
by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah (London, England)

My sister had a stone for breaking palm kernels,
which my mother sold in the market to buy us food.
Without the breaking of palm nuts, we had no food
as the war crumbled my mother’s stall,
and my father lost his job at the beginning of the war.
One day, my mother asked my sister to get firewood
for her to cook our dinner and breakfast.
My sister had the gift of memories among us
and had never forgotten a thing in all her life.
She went into the bush for the firewood
and returned with dry and broken twigs of the Iroko,
logs of hibiscus and yew trees, fresh vegetables,
or what her hands caught inside the bush.
Whatever went up must meet the sky or the clouds,
but she realised that she didn’t have her stone anymore.
Like a flash of light, she dashed back into the bush
to search for her precious black stone.
Arriving at the spot where she got the firewood,
she saw her stone lying flat under a thicket,
covered by worms, spiders and scorpions,
as though the small stone was their lost mother
and they were over themselves with happiness.
But my sister screamed and scratched them off,
and returned home a heroine with a jubilant spirit.
My mother was the first to see a worm in her pot,
which the heat of cooking did not smother to death.
My father opened his tobacco can and saw spiders.
He threw both spiders and tobacco into the fire.
My eldest sister felt something crawling on her body;
she screamed and climbed on me, scratching my neck.
I tore her dress off her body and flung it out,
spiders crouched like crooked corpses in death throes
and wingless scorpions flew out of her chest.
I felt a serial sensation in my sweaty armpits;
I rushed to our local pharmacist faster than yesterday,
as though I cooked my ancestors for breakfast.
The man sprayed a million insecticides over me,
and I felt like a goat about to be roasted in a furnace.
That’s why I’m this way, you see now, skinless bones,
a man alive without a face but full of shadows

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Black Poplars
by Don Walicek (San Juan, Puerto Rico)

Back in the hotel room you asked
what had made me quiet, and I showed you
three pebbles from Dachau lodged
in the sole of one of my new shoes.
Twelve hours earlier, we walked together
to the barracks, then parted, each
on our own, no longer with any plan.
I immersed myself in a long row
of exhibition panels while you saw
the grounds, listing the names of all
the trees—bare-leafed, tall, and grey.
I think we felt closest later, in downtown
Munich, almost freezing as we mixed
with revelers in those first few minutes
of the new year on the crowded square.
We were disappointed when the lights
on the large tree at Marienplatz turned
off just before midnight. The cathedral
stayed dark as police in headlamps
readied machine guns on its balconies.
Fireworks faltered and the clock chamber
stood chimeless. I needed ritual, its ring,
another place, until you handed the man
in a keeifyah some of our sparklers, and
he waved them high above our heads.

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Fall
by Jack Stallins (Louisville, Kentucky)

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Reciprocity
by Sara Green (Glastonbury, Connecticut)

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Judge 2025 Brendan Walsh

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Winners 2024

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FIRST PLACE:  Laurie Zimmerman
 
Lunar Eclipse Litany, East and West
 
My neighbors say my little dog 
howled all day while I was gone.
 
Maybe howling at raccoons back east
where I lived in the country, how they hid
under the lilacs nights and peered out at me.
 
Or howling here in the west at innumerable cats
creeping the paths of cactus and broken glass.
 
Howling the memory of a grandchild
knocking daily at my door, planting
her handprints on the window
 
who was once in love with us but now
thousands of miles away, forgetting.
 
Howling a sudden rumble when armadas
of snow used to skid from the roof
 
howling reports of falling palm fronds
hitting the concrete, setting off car alarms
 
howling the bears snorting loudly in leaves
howling bullets zinging against electric wires
 
frogs piping from the crust of vernal pools
or rotor-wash beating the iron-barred door.
 
Howling country, howling city
howling east and west, thrash of grasses
screams of addicts in the alley.
 
I’m envious of my tiny dog, how she howls
for the catastrophes around her, then lies down
though still trembling, to nap, even now next to me
 
moaning as if the walnut of her heart
is cracking open, as if hearing my blood
 
howling too because wildfires, because
tear gas, because lies and children in cages
because my own unreachable babies
 
howling because the parking lot full of dark
and two more friends dying, another stranger
lynched in the park, because disappearing
 
coral reefs and cheetahs, because soot
visible in the air, because drought
 
because rising water and islands of plastic
because cancer, because earthquakes
 
broken bridges and breached levees
ice on the power lines and piles of snow.
 
Let’s howl instead because dangling pomegranates
because fields of turkeys, a flock of bluebirds
 
because here or there, in spite of startled, in spite
of sad or tired or frightened or night, because
 
sometimes hopeful, despite too few bees
bumping the abundance of grace-berried cherries
 
some hanging, some falling, because sometimes
full moon, though sometimes this eclipse.
 

Judge’s comments:
Beautifully crafted with musical language and sensory imagery, this litany of howling had me coming back to it again and again. The poem perfectly pivots in the middle from the napping tiny howler, “moaning as if the walnut of her heart / is cracking open,” to the speaker who takes over with their own reasons to howl. A volta occurs four stanzas from the end, ending the poem in gratitude for good things we can all howl at.

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SECOND PLACE:  Panika Dillon

​Judge’s comments:
This poem’s power lies in vivid imagery, charged with figurative language, beautiful sound, and line breaks that yield tragic surprises. The ending picture of children mortaring themselves into the “seams of soil,” along with the double meaning of “mortared,” is unforgettable.

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THIRD PLACE: Lynn Pedersen

After Moving, I Train Myself to Call This Home

The key is to leave the new house as many times as possible in the first hours and days, hitch a ride with a family member going to pick up bread or get gas & each time pay attention to what stores are on each corner, where the school is, the library, the pharmacy, how you’d get there on foot or by bike & never think back to the last city or compare the 1960s ranch to this 1970s split level & which is dumpier or consider how you’ve just gone from an unfenced half acre of Kentucky bluegrass with oaks & a homemade swing to a chain link yard of scrabbly shrubs & grasshoppers & no climbing trees, from a street named for a president to one named for a Union soldier & railroad man & how long it’ll take for friends to contact you, if they ever do—no, comparisons will disorient you & make you sick—so instead, you focus on the snowy peaks of this state’s license plate, count the number of chain restaurants, note how the Rockies are due west & always visible, so no matter where you are, you are not lost as you try to memorize street names, call out the correct left & right turns on the way back & pulling into the driveway you say over & over: this is.

Judge’s comments:
This prose poem offers an engaging, comprehensive set of steps in one long, run-on sentence of concise language and specific details that range from a “1970s split level” to a street named for “a Union soldier & railroad man.” With this breathless training regimen, the poet shows how one can get through and accept a difficult life change.

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Past Judges

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