Winners Circle
Please join us in celebrating our 2022 contest winners. We are honored to share their poetry and their stories.
POETRY
OUR 2025 WINNERS
First Place
América Latina
By Alexis Valle
América Latina
by Alexis Valle
I am Latin America.
The continent they carved with knives,
the body they stitched with barbed wire,
the song they tried to mute with gunpowder and chains.
I am the ash of burned villages,
and the seed that sprouted in that ash.
I am every massacre remembered in silence,
and every silence broken by drums.
You thought we would stay ghosts,
but we walk—barefoot, bleeding, unbroken.
You came with ships and hunger,
with greed heavy in your hands.
You thought the land was yours to plunder,
but the land remembers who her children are.
You thought gold was god—
we knew better.
Our gods live in rivers and mountains,
in jaguars and in stars,
in grandmothers’ kitchens and children’s eyes.
You poisoned the rivers.
We made the rivers sing again.
You cut down the forests.
We planted the forests back.
You built walls.
We tore them down with our bodies,
and if we fall, we rise again,
because the soil always pushes up new roots.
You called us savages,
but you feared our wisdom.
You called us slaves,
but you trembled at our rebellions.
You called us immigrants,
but we have always been here—
our bones older than your borders,
our bloodlines written in the stone.
We are the workers bent over your fields,
the mothers raising nations from scraps,
the children you tried to disappear,
the fighters you tried to bury.
We bloom in the shadows,
we multiply in the cracks of your empire.
Understand this:
you cannot own us.
Not our music, not our food, not our words,
not our saints or our sinners,
not our land, not our blood.
You take and take,
and we still remain,
singing in Spanish, in Portuguese, in Quechua, in Guaraní,
singing in the heartbeat of drums older than your maps.
We are the machetes in the cane fields,
the fists in the plazas,
the pens writing stories that outlive your headlines.
We are resistance dressed in every color.
We are survival carved into our DNA.
Try to erase us, and we only grow louder.
Try to bury us, and we only rise stronger.
Try to silence us, and we only sing harder.
We are Latin America.
We are unkillable.
We are the thunder before the storm,
the fire that leaps from ember to blaze.
We are the children of the sun and the night.
And we do not die easy.
Second Place
Brown Beauty
By Paulina Lam Esparza
Brown Beauty
by Paulina Lam Esparza
They said white was light,
was right, was beautiful.
They taught me beauty meant fading—
blonde like god-light,
skin like untouched snow,
bodies soft enough to vanish.
And me—
sun-scorched child,
mud on my knees,
hair thick as questions,
praying to be less seen.
But I remember now—
not a lesson,
a pulse.
My skin: earth-warm,
packed with maíz,
ash from grandmothers
who danced barefoot
on burning stone
and laughed like thunder.
My eyes: not ocean,
but soil—rich, dark,
laced with gold,
where roots don’t ask
permission to grow.
Her hair may gleam like bleached silk—
mine is constellation-black,
braided sky,
the kind of night
you get lost in on purpose.
And this body—
not made to dissolve.
It bends like riverbanks,
rises like hills
that never learned how to bow.
I carry my people’s nose,
my people’s lips,
my people’s weight—
and I wear it like armor.
No mirror made for someone else
gets to rewrite what I already am.
Third Place
Before the World Named
Me Mother
By Alexandra Giffin
Before the World Named Me Mother
by Alexandra Giffin
My body unfurls like earth—
soft with newness,
my skin as thin as petals,
as if I’ve just been born.
I bleed quietly
into the morning—
the ache of becoming
and unbecoming,
like cut stems
still thirsting
for their roots.
September came and drenched
my lips in honey
from flowers that bloomed
through a season of rage—
the kind that takes your breath away.
Love growing thicker than blood,
leaving its mark in every crease.
Don’t just buy me flowers.
Bottle time
so it can live beyond memory—
so the scent of now
might still cling
to what’s left of me
in a decade,
in a daughter,
in the dust.
Fill the air with perfume,
as if love itself
had opened its throat
and breathed.
Let this be what is held—
the way my body remembers
every hour of every day,
the headiness of lilacs lingering
at the mouth of spring,
forget-me-nots pressed between pages,
as if I could ever forget
this belonging,
this becoming,
that began
long before the world
remembered to name me
Mother.
WINNERS
About Alexis, Paulina & Alexandra
first place winner
Alexis Valle
Alex Valle is a Criminal Justice student at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where they balance academic rigor with a deep passion for writing. Their work explores identity, queerness, and the complexities of living in a fractured world, often blending personal narrative with broader social commentary. Currently, Alex is developing a poetry series that reflects on resilience, belonging, and what it means to exist at the crossroads of Latin and queer identity.
Every poem is a small resurrection — a chance to say, I was here, and I felt this, and it mattered. Poetry isn’t about being understood; it’s about being witnessed.
second place winner
Paulina Lam Esparza
Paulina Lam Esparza is a poet and designer from northern Mexico, currently living in the United States. Her work explores identity, memory, and cultural inheritance through a bilingual lens, weaving together the textures of place, language, and belonging. With a background in architecture and visual design, she approaches poetry as both structure and space—crafting verses that are at once grounded and lyrical. Her debut memoir, I Don’t Want to Forget This, will be published in November 2025.
In architecture, I learned how light, space, and silence can tell a story. In poetry, I learned they already were the story — I just had to listen closely enough to translate them into words. Poetry is where I let myself feel without translation.
third place winner
Alexandra Giffin
Alexandra Giffin is an award-winning poet based in the Pacific Northwest. Her work explores motherhood, memory, and the legacy we carry—tracing how personal histories echo through emotional and physical landscapes. Her poetry has appeared in Raven Review and was shortlisted for the Mist & Mountain International Poetry Prize in 2023. She draws inspiration from the wild terrain of the North Cascades and the liminal spaces where transformation begins. She is currently completing her debut chapbook manuscript.
Connect with her on Instagram: @thewayfindingwoman
Poetry asks me to translate the unspoken — to give shape to memory, longing, and the quiet truths that live beneath the surface. It’s an act of courage disguised as craft.
POETRY
OUR 2025 Honorable Mentions
Mood Ring
By Elizabeth Toner
Mood Ring
by Elizabeth Toner
I wanted a mood ring
almost as much as I wanted
a wide-toothed comb with an outsized handle
to stick in the back pocket
of the Levi bell-bottoms Mom wouldn’t buy me for the longest time
almost as much as I wanted that 7-Up Bonne Bell Lip Smacker
that I saved 10 weeks of my quarter-a-week allowance for
almost as much I wanted skinnier thighs to tuck into those bell-bottoms
thighs that could dance any kind of rhythm at the middle school dance
or land any kind of high kick at cheerleading tryouts
and that would never, ever be described as thunderthighs.
I wanted that piece of glass set in cheap metal that turned skin green
as much as I wanted a life-sized Shaun Cassidy poster
hazel eyes and feathered hair watching benevolently
over my shag-carpet-and-paisley-patterned bedroom
as much as I wanted to be Commander Adama’s daughter Athena
or Princess Leia Organa
beautiful, yes, and powerful and smart
outwitting universes fueled by testosterone
as much as I wanted a different answer to the question
How long will Daddy live?
A mood ring contains liquid crystals that change colors in response
to small changes in temperature
I should have said to my mother when she told me
Don’t waste your allowance on that cheap thing.
Finger temperature is significantly determined by peripheral blood flow,
which is modulated by the autonomic nervous system
I would have said
as I waved my hand in her face
stone yellow as I tried to find my father
in a nest of chest tubes and ECG wires
stone black as I sat in in my itchy wool funeral skirt
classmates sympathetically lined up behind me
stone green stolen forever as Mom packed up
Levis
Lip Smacker
Shaun Cassidy
And moved us to adulthood.
Pandora (reversed)
by Panika M. C. Dillon
Pandora (reversed)
by Panika M. C. Dillon
during the night more butcher paper children come
to deck your halls— this time from Robb
Elementary from Santa Fe High School— they’re
here to apply they want to be
admitted to your academy your portrait
gallery in the attic to
be frozen in time you’re told casting spells against
the dark is not women’s work is
what politics is is a man’s world a land of
unhappening you’re the scarlet
letter opener with caliche in your blood
it’s caked under your fingernails
to gnaw on during mass shooter drills & threaded
through your hail Marys candles melt
crayoned eyes & you can’t glue the kids back into
their family’s photo albums
you can only cross them like popsicle sticks &
wrap them in yarn like gods’ eyes
Baby’s Breath
by George Harvilla
Baby’s Breath
by George Harvilla
She writes poems about screen-doors and sleeping cats.
She writes sorrow, writes blank verse and rain,
but she cannot capture light.
Not as she once did.
Once, with an ancient Brownie,
she caught the image of her boy,
his bow tie gray stars on a gray background,
pressed and fixed it
to the inside edges of a resin frame:
and in his eyes, the captured secrets
of dried-up fields and drying years,
the secrets of living in a dirt-road town,
V-E and V-J Days, Korea waxing, waning,
steel mills closing down,
then distant, exotic cities, Newark, Watts,
burning through hot gone summers.
What this country needed was a good war.
And so, he sailed as his father had.
Enlisting on a whim,
his father had run “the slot”
between Kyushu and Okinawa,
on the flat-top Bunker Hill;
came home in two small boxes.
The company that made the boxes
went on to press coffee tins, then baby carts.
You see, dead men do wonders for the economy.
But there is no box for hours and empty beds.
And so, she wraps the hours and the emptiness
in poems about screen-doors and sleeping cats.
She wraps them in poems about rain…
And still, she cannot capture light.
On her mantle, in a paint-can
lined with baby’s breath,
are 13 buttons,
black anchors on a black background…
When she dreams,
it is of oceans and old secrets,
as if they were a loved-one’s ashes.
Mariposa
by Alyson Rose-Wood
Mariposa
by Alyson Rose-Wood
My mother and I were both born in Virginia,
but our lives have always followed migrations.
We wear monarchs on our wrists—
orange wings rising and falling with each pulse—
inked before moving to Yosemite,
to a town called Mariposa, Spanish for butterfly.
I saw monarchs in San Antonio,
their flight stitching Texas skies
while I was in college,
their orange blazes as sure as compass points.
My mother once worked in Hermosillo,
her first consular post,
breaking barriers no one thought women could.
Later, both of us worked along the border,
where families crossed daily for care.
Like monarchs, they carried no visas,
only the right to move toward survival.
At our family ranch in Oracle, Arizona,
we shared long afternoons
watching the desert shift with light,
and learned how roots endure in dry ground.
Now in Yosemite,
she helps me raise my daughter.
Three generations—
our lives braided like milkweed vines.
Each autumn the monarchs return to Michoacán,
to oyamel forests, to memory.
And on our wrists we carry this truth:
fragile wings can span continents,
and what passes from mother to daughter
is more than survival—
it is belonging,
it is return.
POETRY
PAST WINNERS
2024
First Place
Bridge Over A Bone River
By Lollie Butler
Bridge Over A Bone River
by Lollie Butler
In a border town built on drought and tourista dollars,
I walk through stalls of silver and tequila
while along la frontera,
two men and a woman like flat, handcuffed.
One will not live to be deported.
Crossing this “bridge over a bone river”,
each became a Christo, carrying the cross of his own body.
In the end, God became a tree, a lizard or a cloud.
When the sun over Sonora hammers,
every living thing is pummeled down into the earth
where it waits for nightfall to rise and howl.
This is a siesta town but it is my country north of here
sleeps. Under our eyes, the nameless dead collect.
We will awaken when a ‘migra’s rifle fires
or when the ghost of compassion returns to ask
what we’ve done with our inheritance.
One wears a ragged shirt, the other a baseball cap
and the woman ears a crucifix around her neck.
I might forget them
had I not seen their faces as I drive north toward home,
silver bangles cold against my wrists.
Second Place
Instead of Visiting You in the
Memory Center
By Chelsea Kerwin
Instead of Visiting You in the Memory Center
by Chelsea Kerwin
I vacuumed, watered the plants, grocery shopped,
worked weekends for time and a half pay. I walked
the dog until he started limping, took him to two vets,
purchased him an orthopedic bed with oversized bolsters.
No one used the word degenerative, but the cabinets
filled with pain pills and peanut butter. I moved in with
the man I want to spend my life with, he taught me
how to use his record player, how the needle recreates
the song by soaring over deviations etched in the vinyl.
We people-watched at the festival, I bought a flower crown,
the mead and Shakespeare made the world spin.
I read a book full of rotting snow and frozen-shut eyes,
outside a blizzard, inside Ares staring out the window.
I decorated the townhouse with gnomes and fairy lights,
travelled to Italy, got engaged on a cliffside in Sorrento,
ranked wedding venues all over Maryland. We drove out
to Massapequa for grandma’s funeral, I made a speech
in your place. I told everyone over and over you were ok,
you were comfortable, happy. Her death couldn’t touch you.
I stayed with mom after her surgery, took out her trash,
washed her hair in the kitchen sink, filled her birdfeeder.
I made a photo album of our last family trip to Alaska.
In my favorite, a small figure snaps a picture of a mountain.
I put a broken record back in its sleeve. I kissed my good
boy goodbye between two farewell shots at the final vet.
I smoked pot and watched black and white movies,
I searched the basement for mold and mildew, cried
and journaled and didn’t even bother railing at God.
I slept in and made love to my fiancée. On karaoke night
I sang Sister Golden Hair and Love is a Rose. I ate mushrooms
and visited you astrally. You were alright without me. Why not?
Didn’t I live as you taught me? If guiltily, if sometimes low,
I still caught the occasional sunset, stepped out into several
warm weather rainstorms, I cooked crispy skin chicken thighs
and danced like a jackass in the kitchen to our favorite songs.
Third Place
I Tell the Ocean
By Hayden Park
I Tell the Ocean by Hayden Park
by Hayden Park
I tell the ocean the things I used to tell you, these
lulling waves that wash my soul clean of the
worries that always whisper at my knees, my
fingers, the parts of my body that go untouched,
and I’ll make do with the sand, instead of your touch
that I craved so much. Sitting on the rocks like
some expired sunrise, today, I’ll tell the ocean
everything I used to tell you yesterday, all the things
I missed so much. I hope those crashing waves
will remind me of all that old bitter pessimism, like
kites on the horizon, so wonderfully far away, so far
even if I close my eyes I’ll never see them again.
I tell my violin the things I used to tell you. While
playing the melancholy lines, I leaned in, and,
sotto voce, my bow told me to sever the ties that held me
like a vice to your heart. The melodies lilted like the
morning, and I realized I’d been waiting for something
that would have burnt me like cold ashes biting ice
over long-cremated hope. When my violin speaks to me,
I realize it’s my own voice, echoing inside all this
ancient wood. The Plowden del Gesù was made from
old-world tonewood, and now I breathe in that old
Cremonian air, the faint pencil tracings, measurements
like a tailor around my breast. Your touch is like this
one, with its secrets held in the intense varnish, and
I wonder how your arms will feel around my waist.
I’ll tell you the things I used to keep to myself. I
will be the first by your bedside, reciting stories
that are more than fiction. In our memories, we lived
so vividly and laughed like there was everything to
live for. I want to jump off this waterfall with you
and slide down because that silent rain can. I
wonder if it’s just the drizzle collecting on the
sidewalk, dappling like a forest floor, or tears,
like the drizzle on your face falling from windows
I left open. I didn’t rush to close them this time,
not wanting to miss that cool mist through the screen
on my cheek. And I wanted to hear the sky bleed
to remind me even heaven has wounds like mine.
2023
First Place
This Is Not America
By Raya Yarbrough
This Is Not America
by Raya Yarbrough
This is not America,
this is twisted wood in sand.
This is 10 million years
in this stone, in my hand.
This is the dirt beneath the factory.
Dirt beneath the church.
Dirt which holds, refractory
to governmental girth.
We drive and we stride
and we fall and we ride
without thought,
on the crumbled blood of mountains.
But this is not America,
these are fathoms and tides.
These are homes of loons and otters
only human hands divide.
This is the hiss of reeds
a sea above a sea,
an old spiritual, moaning,
in the language of the Hickory.
From ancient river spines
boils brine from the fault,
and we have forgotten ourselves,
as the children of salt.
But this is not America,
this is 5:09 pm
and the cobweb in the window
has caught fire again
in the lift of summer’s nothings,
spectral breaths which lift the weave
to breathe through phantom tendons
on the edge of this eve.
Now the wind chimes, now a shadow
following the ring,
none of these have ever been at war
with anything.
I call to this land
by the name given to it
by the Bear and the Orca,
by the fox and the crow.
The name we can hold in our hands
in the driftwood
but we can never know.
Second Place
Sahara
By Cassie Lipton
Sahara
by Cassie Lipton
One day, my body
will not remember it’s anger
the way the Sahara
does not remember
it was once ocean.
One day, the seasickness
will become less violent,
the waves less treacherous,
as drop by drop you drain
from the space I’ve left open.
One day, I will step out
and the water will be ankle-deep.
Your memory is sea salt
on my face and in my hair
but drawing is no danger
One day, I will lay on the damp
sand, soft and pliable
and build castles of everything
I have become without you,
when I’ve washed away my anger.
And in a thousand years,
I will lie on the dunes
and feel the dry heat on my back
and it will be
as if you were
nothing.
Third Place
Elemental
By Jenna Martinez
Elemental
by Jenna Martinez
Aire
at eighteen, my mother runs away
to the border to marry my father.
the air that carries her to Laredo
seeps into the seeds of me.
I bloom into a small tornado.
breezes ferry me into soft beds and soft bodies.
in Mexico, a woman holds my palm
eres inquieta, she says.
I turn 33 in Death Valley.
the wind strikes the sand
into wisps the shape of snakes.
Fuego
the heat of Brooklyn
evaporates up the summer concrete
holding the steps of all of us
tumbling through the city.
I have a husband, a girlfriend, and a lover.
I am a giant.
I press my heavy foot onto the street
stepping over the bridges
that touch borough to borough.
unfurled, I expand across the city,
come to its borders and spill.
Agua
on the southside of San Antonio,
the curandera spins a bath for sweetness.
the petals fall onto the shower floor.
I toe the constellations at my feet.
bathed in honey,
I loosen the laces, untie myself
from my life, my marriage,
my pebble of earth.
I slip into dark waters.
Tierra
a small compass emerges in my belly.
I follow the arc of sun.
its origin touches the bedroom windows,
bowing in the living room.
I press blooms in to the clay Midwest earth,
their maroon faces stretch over the lawn
vining toward sun.
2022
First Place
Raining Red
By Mridvi Khetan
Raining Red
by Mridvi Khetan
I grew up believing that the rain is red.
Red like the scars mapped across my body,
gifted by a man who colour red embodied
Hot stew for all meals resembled the red sandstone,
which brother went to mine from blood-marked zones
Every day we took a bath in red water,
sourced from a brick well
Everywhere we were blocked by red tape,
sourced from bureaucratic cells
You see, red is omnipresent
It’s the colour of resistance but also the colour of our blood
Does this mean we’re born to resist?
I resisted red
but how can you, if all you see are corpses - dead.
A memory surfaces in my head,
how my sister was shamed monthly for her red
I can smell it too, you know
The red, a scent of my morning breath
Remnants of the wars fought by words I can only dare to speak in stealth
If red is the paint I’ve been coloured in, body and bone
It’s only logical to see my surroundings in the same tone
So when it rained the other day
I said,
“Ma, see it’s raining red today!”
Second Place
In The Tide
By Emily BALCHUNAS
In The Tide
by Emily Balchunas
He dragged himself out of bed
as the sun began to rise.
The seagulls were his alarm,
he rubbed the dreams from his eyes.
This lighthouse has seen some storms,
she sways in the night.
The wind whistles through her creaks,
but never seems to get inside.
Coffee soaked the air,
the windows let in the sunshine.
The ocean brings a breeze that shifts the house
from time to time.
The lighthouse was clean and knew his routine,
this presence of a man.
Her eggshell walls shined a bit brighter,
her lamp had a certain glisten.
She even seemed to stand a bit taller
as he occupied her land,
and with every rope he knotted
the wind would lift his hand.
The keeper of this structure was patient,
and he cared.
In the morning he’d sing to her
and at night he’d climb her stairs.
Clicking on her burning light
like brushing back her hair.
With a hot cup of tea
she thought they both would share.
Fall came and went,
every winter, time would freeze.
Every night he’d shine her light
for any ships lost at sea.
As the days would pass them by,
their nights together began to cease.
No matter how tall she stood,
she couldn’t bring him peace.
One day, the morning breeze came in
And the sun began to rise.
There were no coffee smells,
or sleepy groggy eyes.
Gone without a trace,
like he was taken in the night.
The lighthouse stood empty and still,
with his memory held inside.
Dare I to say to this very day
as the sun is sure to rise,
her eggshell halls and walls will wait
to dance with him again in the tide.
Third Place
Do You Remember?
By Robert Watt
Do You Remember?
by Robert Watt
Do you remember the Christmas ball?
Your hair worn up above its wispy strands
And swinging jewels that kissed the neck
Cool and scented with the musk of foreign lands
You rose from a dress the colour of your lips
Plunged a neckline that drew the hungry eye
Onto the eggshell curves and the teasing split
long though never quite revealed the thigh
Do you remember Trafalgar square?
Rushing to the front, running with the madding crowd,
High on passions that quickly gave to laughs or tears,
A rebel stance and voice exuberant and loud
You were strong and lithe, danced into the night,
Filled with beans for a life come recently mature.
We lit candles at both ends and did it all,
Having time and energy to spare for more.
Do you remember Fridays after work
and weekend afternoons lost in sin?
We’d toss our clothes, fall carefree in a fumbling yearn,
Hands buried in hair and greedy for a touch of skin.
We did it all together, hardly left a day apart,
With nothing but ourselves for warmth but happily,
Scraping pennies for bills and budget meals,
Slowly making house then family.
Do you remember how we got so old?
Our faces fell and hair tuned thin and grey.
Focus shifted nearer, the youthful fires cooled,
While the world unnoticed moved away.
We slowed, quietened by relentless years,
Congealed into the people we portrayed;
Staid companions, content with holding hands
Creaking and groaning into life’s denoting fade.