2024 Open Winners | NE Poetry Society

2024 Open Poetry Contest Winners

Thank you to everyone who entered our second-annual poetry contest! And special thanks to our guest judge, Leah Naomi Green!

Congratulations to all the winners and honorable mentions!

First Place:

Susan Mason Scott

"Champion"

Mud Daubers paralyze black widows to feed their young.

Messy, thready, twisted, awry—

the web strands.

The neighbor attacks vultures with a hose.

I snarl – “everyone’s hungry” – saccharine,

the Mother’s salty.

My mother admonished every time I slit silk with my tongue whet.

My mother’s dead. I wanted a champion.

The stranger in a rickety lawn chair, middle of a narrow road, attends five newborns

attempting to suckle a dead opossum:

stranded, ladder, backbone—it’s DNA—uncoiled

those newborns had a champion.

My subconscious, a murky trap—failures, impulsivities, inactions, indiscretions—harrows

where the sharpest fault lies—

A thirty-one-year-old drunk woman

struck my nineteen-year-old son 0.27 in her blood

entangled DNA bonds—

my son’s dead.

A Samaritan, a mother, saved his blood-

stained blanket for me what survives

his DNA, 32 this year

I have ceased to mutter she killed him.

Susan Mason Scott is a recently retired mathematics instructor in adult education. She resides in Madison, Indiana, but has lived in several states, countries, and on three continents. She enjoys camping, hiking, and bicycling. Inspiration for her writing comes from exploration and quiet attention. Her recent publications appear at susanmasonscott.com.

Second Place:

Jannett Highfill

"What the Technology of Waiting Accommodates"

Like waiting, air has no residence,

no neighbor, no ear, no door. A stranger

and I collaborate, catch an almost clear

plastic bag before it’s blown treeward.

Remember to breathe, my husband would say,

like a dog with its head out a car window.

For now the waiting is outdoors. Boeing

KC-46 Pegasus refueling and transport planes

from the airbase maneuver overhead,

thunderous, echoey, and so the sky keeps

for the infinite air is unkind. On the grass tops

spiders’ webs hold a geometry of water drops,

shoelace dream catchers.

Later indoors, if needs must, the waiting will

hum claustrophobic and lonely.

Jannett Highfill is a Great Plains poet living in Kansas. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Common Ground Review, The Iowa Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She has three chapbooks, Light Blessings Drifting Together, A Constitution of Silence, and Brown Restless Green. She is coauthor of A Tempered and Humane Economy: Markets, Families, and Behavioral Economics from Lexington Books.

Third Place:

Rebecca Faber

"Manicure"

My first manicure,

a short-term masquerade,

a spoonful of sugar

in a diet of bile.

The manicurist looks me over,

notes the gray at my temples,

my comfortable shoes,

and wears the face that my daughter

wore daily at 13: I can’t believe

that you are going out dressed like that!

The manicurist takes my hands,

sees dry cuticles

and strong veins,

then asks me what I have been doing

with these hands.

I look at them too,

watching my hands in a silent movie—

folding laundry, cooking, scrubbing,

taking second jobs, fighting to stay awake

during night classes,

balancing a dry checkbook.

My eyes move up to meet hers.

I’ve been holding on, I respond.

She looks away (perhaps embarrassed),

grabs a bottle of polish,

asks me what color

I would like to paint

my life.

Honorable Mentions:

in no particular order

Amanda Maynard

"Your rituals don’t work anyway"

what i never learned from my mother was how to be at home in the
thick dust that coated every surface like sand from a broken hourglass
overlapping hands layered on the throat of my father like a rosary
this family heirloom is my birthright this crushed windpipe
spilling around the roots of my incisors like
a piece of meat you just can’t dislodge
wouldn’t you trade anything
to feel relief from this
obsession crumpling your wings
like a defenseless baby bird
in gods cursed fist

blind and contorting you smother yourself with
your own white wax feathers overflowing
between haphazard splayed fingers
this beggar's plea for your mind to be still
like a demented and desperate song
hungry to twitch this blanket
over the corpse of your spirit symmetrically
don't you just want to lay it down at the
feet of perfection one last time
a place where a vast and
empty silence forms the
boundary between you
and the sun
you can't shame the devil baby
but lord knows you’ve tried
if only you could grasp
what you’ve always
prayed for
you know they say
Icarus laughed
as he fell
but i know
for a fact
he screamed
the whole
way
down

Karla Hernandez Torrijos

"Youth Mental Health Unit Bryan Medical Center 2013"

for four days, they didn’t let us see sunlight
like rabid dogs
or the boy whose hand hovered above mine as he swore he could see the future and i never asked
because what if he could?
what if he did see me, now
could i live knowing that truth?
or the girl who’d been in eleven times
who didn’t speak spanish but knew every word to selena’s como la flor
these are fragments
and over a decade has passed
i cannot see their faces or remember their names
they may not be of this earth, still
yet for a moment, we lived within the same four walls
each one of us, distinctly wounded
labeled some kind of insane
each one of us, despite our efforts,
alive

Amy Irish

"The Power of a Name"

Lin Marshall Brummels

"A Watched Pot"

Here he comes, squeeze play, it's gonna be close,
holy cow, I think he's gonna make it!
Meatloaf, Paradise by the Dashboard Light

Henry Doley Zoo reports trade
of a non-breeding cat for one Amur
leopard named Preston to woo
zoo’s own cat, Lady Natalia.

Breeding animals in captivity
is like people coupling
on just the right day in the cycle,
driving a hundred miles,

meeting the fertility specialist.
Doc says we need to find out
how fast sperm swim
up the vaginal channel.

Conception requires a suitable
mix of fluids and chemicals
to create receptivity
for the tiny sperm army:
too much acid,
spermatozoa are lethargic
         take this pill,
          come back next month
repeat the timing,
get it exactly right,
            sex at seven,
             on the road by eight

better this checkup,
sperm are swimming faster
try this cream,
come back next month

repeat the drill
you’re making progress
there’ll be success soon
I think one’s going to make it

Rene Mullen

"Factory Housing Foundation circa 1930"

The telling of a history is itself

a violence. Speaking it

true is a barrier

battering ram. Speaking

is an unsheathing of a hope

chest up to the hilt, burying it

until hilt becomes breastbone. Silence,

a violence thrust upon us by another

voice, taut string hum strung, stung between

generations.

Violence is learned, passed down every time

we chew our tongues off

there is peace in our words. We evolve

to hum as hum silences thought and thought is

rebellion unmasked.

To peer into history’s secret

shoebox of tongues is an unearthing,

landmines with coin flip precision.

When I say I left because the town

did not want me, I mean that

I know hum of layoffs as retribution

in spaces where the company owns the land

you rent.

Factory families have no luxury

of history. We drink to medicate,

alcohol causes dementia

we hum alone until we bite our bodies loose.

Amy Irish

"The Nuclear Bomb"

after “How to Build a Nuclear Warning” by Erika Benke at the BBC

There is a dread
deep in the bedrock—
a poison buried
in a cast-iron casket
without a key, a secret
shame hidden away.

In 100,000 years
we pray our mistakes will fade
from memory, become fables
of greedy gods creating monsters
they couldn’t contain. Just stories
of cursed earth to avoid, sickness
caused by devils. Never us.

Uneven floors, rough walls.
Moisture seeps, condenses this far down.
Caverns carved to imprison our tools
of self-destruction. A nightmare landscape
where we hope no human will tread.

But how long can we hide
our darkness? We will collapse
the entrance, seal it with concrete,
cover it with soil. But can we hold
humanity back from itself, from
repeating its own ouroboros history?

Warnings, symbols, signs.
On corrupted earth we erect monuments
to a terrifying past, an endangered
future. We hope our message is clear.
Hope all the locked gates
of our hell will hold.

Janet Highfill

"I Read Ninety Percent Are Not Free Range"

A bison at the neighborhood animal farm has pine needles,

a fascicle, tangled in his matted fur—fractal green and native

brown to mark winter territory. It’s not a ranch. They don’t

forage. Do they hunger for narrative: O let them be left, wildness

and wet? In an old schoolbook the lithograph “blizzard” is a bison

facing into the wind, two more, then a herd lost in white-gray.

In Audubon’s Quadrupeds of North America American Bison

or Buffalo are weatherless, seasonless,

in a lonesome place—ourself behind ourself concealed—

Lin Marshall Brummels

"After Grief Comes Love"

In the air

which moves the grass

moves the fur of a black horse

his words come back,

old griefs carried on the wind.

Linda Hogan, Left Hand Canyon

Breeze has calmed, wind turbines clunk,

this year, two house cats pass, sixteen and seventeen.

My sister-in-law who was like my sister

went to eternal rest during a soulless funeral service.

In equine panic, palomino startles,

runs from thunderclaps, tangles in old barbwire fence.

My son and his wife must put down

their prize golden filly after she ruins both back legs.

Grief is eating all the flowers

in our gardens and is chewing holes in the pumpkins.

It is going after neighbors’ yards

and horse pastures in unchecked ugly growth.

Our grief is personal, but we have hope.

Countless people grieve after losing loved ones in war zones.

Peace does not happen automatically.

To survive grief, it will mean offering our love to others.

Lin Marshall Brummels

"Gazin West"

after Lyn Denaeyer’s Breaking Even

He might set on the steps of an evenin’

trying to settle in his mind a way

to make peace with this compromise,

a way to do something with this piece

of clay in the middle of corn country.

It is not the vision he held on to those

years in eastern colleges, not the view

he had in mind when he thought of cows’

grazing, not his idea of where to ride.

He might have a beer or two out there,

gazin’ off to the west where his heart

planned to rest, riding in short grass

pastures too big to see perimeter fence.

Settling here was a way to make it work

with her, a way to raise a family, drive

to a city job, all those trappings of life

he wanted too, but it hurt just the same

to understand he couldn’t always do it

his way. He might sit out there a bit

some days till the call of the west

calmed, while he worked on a plan

to turn these cornfields into grassland.

Shakiba Hashemi

"Prayer Beads"

I was born in a year of revolution,

when the Supreme Ayatollah seized power

and Shah left my country.

This is when I inherited chador:

a black fabric that covers me

from head to toe.

Now decades later,

my dream is to be burned by the sun

and caressed by the breeze.

Ever since Jupiter’s gossamer rings

reigned over our skies,

my horizon has remained bleak. I am

left with my prayer beads:

thirty-three orbs

glowing on a taut string.

Every morning, I recite the name of

the man I have a crush on 21 times,

then chant the hues of the rainbow,

and finish with earth, water, air, fire, amen.

Every afternoon I envy the obelisk of my shadow,

embraced by the sun’s slanted rays.

What will happen if I remove my chador?

If the wind freely brushes through my hair?

A sigh rattles the burning cage

of my throat.

Karla Hernandez Torrijos (she/her) is the recipient of the 2022-2023 Irby F. Wood Prize for Poetry and the 2020-2021 Vreeland Award for Poetry. Her writing interrogates our understanding of home, displacement, and the liminal space in between. Her work can be found in Preposition: An Undercurrent Anthology.

Amy Wray Irish is a member of the Columbine Poets of Colorado. She grew up in the Chicago area, received her MFA from Notre Dame, then fled the Midwest for Colorado sunshine. Irish has two contest-winning chapbooks—Down to the Bone (2023), which reimagines fairy tales as sources of strength for women; and Breathing Fire (2020), an intimate response to a year of national combustion. Learn more at www.amywrayirish.com.

Lin Marshall Brummels earned degrees from UNL and Syracuse University. Poems are in Poet Lore, San Pedro River Review, Concho River Review, Oakwood, Plainsong, Nebraska Life and others. Chapbooks are “Cottonwood Strong” and “Hard Times,” - won a Nebraska Book Award. Books, “A Quilted Landscape,” Scurfpea Publishing. Forthcoming, The Last Yellow Rose, Sandhills Press.

Rene Mullen’s work can be found in Santa Fe Literary Review, Blue Collar Review, Poets.org, and is the winner of the 2023 Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Poetry Prize. He's been on multiple poetry slam teams and holds an MFA from Randolph College. Rene calls the Southwest home.

Shakiba Hashemi Li iis an Iranian-American poet. She is a winner of 2023 Best of the Net Award and Philadelphia Stories Editor’s Choice Award. She is the author of the chapbook Murmur (Word Poetry, 2023) and has been nominated for Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.

All poems were judged blind and no poet received any special treatment or unfair advantage. Membership in the Nebraska Poetry Society was not required to enter the contest.