2025 Winners
Haiku
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Sonnet
✎
Free verse
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Villanelle
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Limerick
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Cinquain
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Haiku ✎ Sonnet ✎ Free verse ✎ Villanelle ✎ Limerick ✎ Cinquain ✎
2025 Winners
Will be announced on the 10th November.
2025 Shortlist
A New Grammar for Atlantis by Marie Vibbert
An End to Time by Luisa A Igloria
Dice Rolling Eternal by Akis Linardos
Dualism by Thom Hawkins
Emergency Room by Jasmine Zhang
Father’s Love by Crispy Chang
Schrödinger's Attic by Muizzah Fatima Munir
Spooky Action at a Distance by Gary Hugh Day
Uncertainty by Ian Li
Vomiting Stars Poetica by Susan K Tatiner
A New Grammar for Atlantis
by Marie Vibbert
...broken lengthwise
We are
Quality entangled (with/by/for) [name]
& the discarded --
[milquetoast/moderate] (strike it and say "kind")
We the artificial can unprevent
In a single day and night of
>> overwrite: inexorable seep of complacency,
the [great/cruel] citystate of America was [error 404].
Incorrigible, titanic garbage mat
[lumbering / slouching] toward [dis]freedom!
Ope! No harm meant
Like swollen-bellied mosquitos [we / they]
thirst until all is [undefined]
& gate no mercy
We need new grammars
for {
our trembling futility;
our rage;
}
or [we/you] may snap,
a plastic spoon...
An End to Time
by Luisa A Igloria
I like putting one foot in front of the other,
walking at a steady pace until I change
the speed on the treadmill or come to
the end of the half-hour. I like wiping down
the silver and putting them back in their
drawers, but not ironing out the creases
in a shirt. The child asks, is there
an end of time? It's the kind of question
that can't be answered. If we knew, the world
would be a different place entirely. If we knew,
all measures would be undone. Animals
would never come out of the sealed caves
of their hibernation. The last however many
years of heartache would dissolve like a golden
cube of honey in a glass of tea. The old queen
would leave the hive whenever she wanted to
without being followed by a swarm, without
having to scout for a new home to populate
with food and bodies; without the new queens
killing each other in order to be the only one.
Dice Rolling Eternal
by Akis Linardos
In the eternal void
there comes a brilliant bang
Quieter than a baby’s snore
louder than the end of sound
Quantum fluctuations, a primordial Jackson Pollock
spit colors on a black, expanding canvas
Carving celestial castles
from sands of eternal chance
As has been, as will be done,
before, after, forever
Fireworks spark rivers in the desert
Carbon to branching forms, life from strands
In a pocket eternity, there come soft rains
Youth hungry to experience existence
Elderly aching to pass the torch
Radiant unions, harsh goodbyes
The cosmic candles dim at last,
As entropy reaches its zenith,
returning everything to slumber
Until the dice may roll again
Dualism
by Thom Hawkins
I could hear the cat moving around in the box,
but I was determined to ignore it. My feline
friend was in a state of quantum superposition—
it had to be, if I'd done everything right.
The radiation source, the Geiger counter,
the vial of poison, a half-life had passed
so there was no way to know if the meows
were from a cat’s body or its ghost.
Emergency Room
by Jasmine Zhang
To be frank, quantum physics
makes for terrible metaphor. Of course
the human experience contains
multitudes. Try writing down
the wavefunction for grief, or for kissing
someone you love on the mouth
Or, for the angry blue sky, the
bloodwork, the body arranged
on the stretcher, catatonic in
its dreaming. I fail to find solace
in the pulse-finding machines,
the sterile clockwork of it all
In the waiting room I consider
the thought experiment
about superposition. The nurses
discuss a birthday party while
you possibly die in this bed
I have scorned the study of the living
for its imprecision and even now
I hold onto theories relevant only
at scales we cannot touch. But
I can’t look away, as if superstition
will keep you here
Father’s Love
by Crispy Chang
Though I have never seen it, they say it’s there
Around me, in me, everywhere - an axiom.
A pattern of interference, I feel,
But when I try to take a look, it all collapses
Into a quantised packet, invisible to my eyes
As if it has always been like that.
Is it a wave? A particle? Or neither?
A duality, perhaps,
Showing different faces at different times
If needs be: an unsolvable mystery it remains,
But at least a theory that explains.
Then, I remember, we are entangled.
I look into the mirror and determine, this boy
Had grown into a man, one so familiar.
At the very moment, though distances apart,
I finally recognise, here and now,
The properties of my father’s love.
Schrödinger's Attic
by Muizzah Fatima Munir
At this gathering, everyone’s smiling,
quietly reminiscing, mentioning you,
believing you still exist
only in their memories.
The album keeps gathering dust,
left unopened in Schrödinger’s attic.
I feel your presence—until I turn the page.
The half-faded photographs
never quite trapped your light.
My aunt sees you in my mother’s eyes,
your warmth felt in her love.
Everyone describes you with longing.
I wish for dreams where your waveform
might overlap mine.
While eating my mother’s dishes,
the ones you once made with love,
it feels as if I’m enveloped by your warmth.
Just when I think I’ve reached you,
you collapse into air,
a probability—erased.
Your smile lives on, when you yourself don’t.
Spooky Action at a Distance
by Gary Hugh Day
They had the same print
In their living rooms, Lowry:
Coming Home from the Mill, 1928.
And whenever they glanced
At this lost world,
They felt the familiarity
Of that other place
Which was also home,
Suffusing them with a sense
Of being in two places at once,
Unsure where each began
And the other ended.
She said they were the couple
On the bottom right, moving away
From the patchy crowd
With its comedy hats and boots,
Solo dances, simple mimes,
And pavement melodramas.
All gone, like the factories
The coloured wagon and
The open doors of terraced houses.
Once more his eye is drawn
To the couple heading out of
The frame; arms linked, in step,
And he wonders if she still
Feels this ghostly closeness,
The nearest they come to touching now.
Uncertainty
by Ian Li
She believes a physicist should always be on time,
but tonight, she’s late—
moonlight pooling on her bathroom’s checkerboard tiles
as her thumb eclipses the tiny indicator window.
For now, an unobserved result is both joy and pain,
her life’s wave function not yet collapsed.
For now, her entanglement with a chronically tardy economist
remains Schrödinger’s love, simultaneously broken and eternal.
But she fears superposition is a small step away from delusion,
so her neurons fire wildly, like electrons
excited to a higher orbit, contemplating a quantum jump
to a state of motherhood.
This is no shift between hyperfine states, it’s a leap
from theoretical to practical. Perhaps she won’t make it,
or perhaps she’ll quantum tunnel right through to the other side.
If only she could peel back the future to see if it all works out.
If only she were as reliable as a Cesium clock, immaculate
and cool and golden inside, despite a turbulent world outside.
She could keep time
with this oscillating heart.
Vomiting Stars Poetica
by Susan K Tatiner
Gravity’s gone, gravel’s up. She vomits
vodka and chips in the parking lot. The Beemer
just misses. The Jag swerves like time. What luck!
Stars blue, stars yellow, stars orange, and red
fill her mouth. She gags on a galaxy. Jagged
pieces of some old self tumble in a sloppy blanket
‘round her knees. Sure, the vault of heaven
must be empty now. Sure, she’s made
the void, the void. But no--arms wide, she cries,
“Stars! Stars! Look at the stars!” Vomit
drips from fingertips. It slips down arms
and settles in pits. It twinkles and ripples and comes
to rest. “You’re warped,” she tells only herself.
“Warped enough to make new stars,” she parries.