Editor’s Choice: 2023 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
In my pocket, the shudder of a newborn marsupial.
Along my back, a stampede
of tiny mammoths stomping through snowdrifts,
plummeting down a precipice.
Between our legs, a convergence of ladybugs
seeking out aphids,
reappearing each Spring as if by magic, as if drawn
by the pointillists. In my eyes,
two black holes born to feast on scattered light,
to render it absent.
My foraging fingers rifle through the typewriter,
are robins shedding feathers
to feed them into keys, ripping out the ribbon
with derricked beaks, nesting
in flocks of silence. My skull glows from within,
is bioluminescent, cradles
this thinking prisoner of uncertainties accrued,
my embattled mind
a zigzagging chase, both a pack of stubborn hounds
& the foxes it pursues.
Jonathan Greenhause’s first poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), was the winner of the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Bayou, The Fish Anthology, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Permafrost.