1st Place

First, you have to lower your standards. Not all at once… if you do that, you’ll notice. Start small. Return emails later than you should. Learn to say “I’ll circle back” and never circle back. When someone points out a problem, nod thoughtfully and write it down, then lose the paper. You see a call from your wife, you’ll get back to it later, maybe. It’s not cruel. It’s efficient.

you didn’t hear our cries you didn’t see our dead you didn’t feel our pain

yet you hear our guns yet you see our rage yet you feel their pain

our homes destroyed our food wasted
our water tainted our women raped our children dead our men slaughtered

yet they cry out the wrong name free israel
free israel
free israel from what

dilute.
to make it thinner or weaker to make it digestible
dilute.
to make me thinner or weaker i want to be digestible

i look like a fool holding a diluted heart out to the masses begging for someone to consume me
but when they do, they never finish
they mustn't spoil their appetite they tell me they’ve barely taken three bites.

It is truly cruel to bury a child named Asterion. “The starry one” who was suddenly ripped away from the lights in the sky. A boy who was born as a punishment, condemned to a prison away from his mother’s arms. It is almost ironic; born flawed due to the sins of another. His mother’s reckoning and his father’s embarrassment. They locked him away, a monster deserving only of cold dark stone. He cries for his mother. Prince of the Labyrinth: destined to die by the hands of a “hero”.

She swaggers into the bowling alley
every Friday night. Flared bell bottom blue jeans draped over her washed-out pink Converse.

Her hair was so loud.
It rang through the empty Bellies of every bowling ball It's pink and greys
And purples and blues
Escape shape as it rattled melodically With violence

Oh yeah
she was real cool
but unlike Gwendolyn Brooks too scared to skip school.

So she rebelled by sticking Newports between her plush, blood-pigmented lips and swiping vodka from her mother's mahogany liquor cabinet.

I remember wiping down countertops on a Sunday morning because the restaurant was slow (at least until the Baptists poured in after mass), so there was nothing else better to do than slowly drag a rag across the counter like a droopy ragdoll and hold my breath because I smelt like broasted chicken and my sleeves were soaked in sweat. The night before, I rinsed dirt out of my hair, and two weeks before that, we failed a health inspection. Jobs were on the line, she warned.

How could one write about spring
without flirting with beehives
and sunburnt boys who makeout
with beer cans and raven eyed girls

Spring poems don’t exist
if you can’t rhyme sun
with sultry swim suits
that we bought on sale

When December’s pessimism was present
in our christmas letters and batter mixed with
too much egg and not enough eye contact

Y’know, the polka dotted suits sliced into two?
Yes! Those ones! The ones we slid into after school

Once upon a time, there was a mountain that had existed since the formation of the world. It was twice as ancient as its brethren in the west, who teemed with both human and nonhuman life, and by the time written records came around, the mountain was either a footnote or an unsolvable mystery. This was for two reasons, the first of which being the bones that lined pathways worn down with constant travel and age, and the second being the dragon.

They paved a whole section
of road outside my apartment
in less than a day.
I am grateful,
but I am not fooled.

He is mental illness.

I hear a shuffling and a loud fake cough behind me. I know who it is. He hasn’t spoken yet, but I know him. God help me, I can smell him. Funny how that scent used to make me swoon. Now, it just makes me sick.

“Hey man.”

I turn and see him. I had not expected to see him here, of all places, but I’m not delighted. I had told him to fuck off, the last time we spoke. Never mind the last three times.