Written by: Cuin Reagan Third Place Winner of the 2026 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest Something hangs In the foyer, in the stained-glass solder— Its lead seeps from the florid panes Into tepid pipe water My pale daughter Would bathe in—if I had one— And the carpeted stairs bleed With colonial…
Category: Poetry
Witch Doctor
Written by: Ava Venuk Second Place Winner of the 2026 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest The waiting room has free glass-bowl almond packets. As if stolen, I slip one hundred sea salt calories in my pocket. A woman calls me in. Her office is a green couch,…
HEEP
Written by: Elijah Polance First Place Winner of the 2026 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest Not yet shivering, camera in hand, the trail slopes downward from me. I spot a figure drifting in the corridor of trees, barren and wind-struck. An ant beside those monster legs, blink and he’s gone. Vanished as the…
Opening
Written by: Charlotte Ungar Co-First Place Winner of the 2025 Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest Of all I forget, I remember, the almond blossom painting in your room, naked, your limbs sprawled out— eyeing those bending branches Coiling, climbing one another to end a flower. The blue between the…
fairybreeze
By Anh Lee 2nd place winner of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize We last beyond a century we are forgotten smelling of indigo bodies and abandoned plains enshrouded in sand We feel our desires flicker and wriggle perimeters kissed by thunder, shaped by doves and caressed by lingering legs We…
Aromantic’s Apotropaic
By Charlie M. Case (with a borrowed line from Nicky Beer) Winner of The Edward R. and Frances Schreiber Collins Literary Awards (Poetry) This is not something anyone can eke out of me, so stop asking. Put your hands on me and don’t misinterpret—let me touch you only so we…
Displaced
By Zeynep Özer Winner of The Long River Review Graduate Writing Award Three Women That’s when they started talking. Not when the man with the gun walked into the puddle of blood. Puddle of his wife’s blood. Not when the puddle turned cold turned light painted sirens red and blue. But when…
“Fears After the Indonesian Forest Fires” By Anna Ziering (2017)
Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize, Winner (2017) Death, of course. Having no God. Sunday afternoons, New England falls. Sleet storms like the one that dented the new car and traumatized the dog, who never liked loud noise; who, like me when I was young, couldn’t stomach fireworks. They made us cry—that…
“New Year on Pleasure Island” By Brian Sneeden (2017)
Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize, Second Place (2017) What I did not know to make made itself in vestigial hours between two o’clock and dawn, when the shapes of birds stitch together in my mind, and a single cicada peels the air. Each letter I write returns to water. I start…
“La Fusión” By Gabriela García Sánchez (2017)
It was reverence I felt then, and I did not cower as it vibrated through me. El ritmo bonded us by our pies, our caderas, ventilating the air with scales speeding by. The beats amplified between our pechos, whistling for our cuerpos to collide. So I took a breath that…