⟶ FIRST PRIZE:
Anna Key
Anna Key is married with four children and lives on a small sailboat with her family. She is the author of Notebook of Forgetting and two chapbooks of poetry. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Dappled Things, Convivium, Amethyst Review, Evangelization & Culture, The Windhover, and Catholic Poetry Room. https://annakey.net
Iteration
I repeat. There is nothing autumnal in the rain, season without season, timelessness wholly within time like the sunlit center of a hurricane, minutes linked by a shallow collapse between days that reach their dirty fingers into dead dreams, light white as an unphased moon, moon red on a TV screen in a red room full of storm, ominous and silent. That was a way of putting it.
The present is uninhabitable but sustains in itself the desire to be other than I am. Instrument of erasure, erasure the means and the end, solitude of white space where words are not and something like silence lives, solitude of black space where stars are not and something like nothingness is, relative time and bending light, the appearance of stillness in a moving world that is always half-light and half-dark. I could go on.
Entertain. Entertain the notion that there is something. Entertain the notion that there is something invisible and real. (I don’t care if my children learn nothing from me but the art of sitting still.) Money is almost invisible, mere numbers on a screen. Screen. [Of difficult etymology.] Something interposed so as to conceal from view. Something interposed so as to conceal. Something interposed. Something.
Galaxies and hurricanes are similar in shape. The satellite is my witness. A view that is beyond me becomes part of me, I have seen the world from beyond the world, I have seen myself from beyond myself, words that spiral outward from a silent center. ‘Galaxy,’ from the Greek, γαλα, meaning ‘milk’. Hence the via lactea, or Milky Way. The way of the gift in the form of a word from the Greeks and a galaxy that sustains life. Yes, and the hurricanes. We name them all, the stars and the storms.
⟶ SECOND PRIZE:
Anne Casey
Anne Casey is an Irish poet/writer living in Australia and author of four poetry collections. A journalist, magazine editor, legal author, and media communications director for 30 years, her work ranks in leading national daily newspaper, The Irish Times’ Most Read, and is widely published and anthologised internationally. Anne has won prizes in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, most recently American Writers Review 2021 and the 2021 iWoman Global Award for Literature. She is the recipient of an Australian Government Scholarship for her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney.
It is the first of winter
and all the liquidambars
have cast off their crowns,
golden stars drifting down
for weeks to shroud the listless
grass, clumps of crumpled rust
piling up on every outdoor surface,
my sons' half-hearted forays to rake,
heap, cart engulfed by autumn's implacable
advance, now given way to winter,
windblown piles of flesh, yellow,
brown, red laying waste to the shrivelling
lawn where I am standing now as I wonder
how many have fallen, what three and a half
million looks like: more than this I know.
A few days ago I saw the super blood wolf
moon looming out of a cloudless black night,
resisted the urge to howl. The illusion of its
giant peach face thrusting at us, retreating as
the chill seeped in, my younger son returning
outside over and over as if for the first time
realising some things don't last, not everything
is on tap, that we are all living on borrowed land,
borrowed time.
Sometimes I wonder if this
is what drowning in space
sounds like or screaming
in deep water. If you watch
a duck gliding across
the flawless surface of a lake
for long enough, you can see
its webbed feet pummelling
the glass underside.
I turn back to the warmth
of the kitchen, the dog hot
on my heels, a withered leaf
swinging from his whiskered grin.
Maybe if we stick together,
we might just shake this
thing off.
⟶ THIRD PRIZE:
John Savoie
A dedicated Narnian, John Savoie teaches great books at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Best New Poets, and Poetry in Motion. His first collection, "Sehnsucht," is ready for a publisher.
Single Puzzle Piece Found on Sidewalk
We are not missing a singlepiece of the puzzle, search-
ing box and shelf again
and yet again for the stray
that got away, fallen
perhaps, belly up, the same
drab color as the floor,
or even secretly held
back by one who wants
the snug satisfaction
of filling the last gap,
pressing the picture smack.
Oh no, what we have here
is but the one stray piece,
exquisitely lobed
like the uvula hanging
at the dark of the throat,
scooped on one side
with an aching absence,
curiously colored
as a tropical frog,
interlocking with nothing
but air and conjecture,
the solitary clue
from which we imagine
the elusive whole
and the box it came in.
The New York Encounter 6th annual poetry contest celebrating the 2022 theme, "This Urge for the Truth," was open to all poets writing in English. Our guest judge was Mary Szybist: poet, professor, and winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.
