Winner

Sasha Senal

60 Miles to Wanton Soup

a grove of sunken pines
abysmal summer
smuggles August
into July
sighting deer
older each time
these I saw in a frame
face pressed in the glass
you touched
I retreated
simmering
salt
after I stab each blackberry
root into pulp
can we just have sex
without crying?
I am afraid and still
vitriol from my teeth
doesn’t stop him from taking me
closer to happiness
you will be the spots
the deer doesn’t notice
it loses: the prayer
we offer every sign

Locomoting

I never would have guessed
so many cornfields in Belgium!
each town nearly burdened
by the neatness of the rows
and the miles you could swim
before coming up for air
Belgium—like a memory
caving in when considering
how the corn is a forest
to children in Iowa
shuddering to think
of spreading my arms there
and feeling home.

Home

even in the dark
it swallows me
I bet there was a time
they thought it couldn’t happen here
to see graves drug
clear across the belly of our mother
now that could never happen here
where I have been the lamb
swallowed still
by what was always here
swallowing down the woven lines
of what is still to come

Bullfrog Pond I

The first time I smoked was with two women,
palms lifted to faces in prayer for breath. 
We had the instinct to go there, 

uncovering the deer whose hips 
swayed in her night dash 
towards the last broken trickle 
before crisis.        

How we knew her. Our hands
too: the widows of stained 
soil in February. 

I begged to be quenched under setting sun,
heat from my lungs turning skin yellow,
but those women laughed, eyes too wet to be afraid.

Together sitting, we noticed Redwood
flow: the lines of them
a cresting
wave that would never land.

In the Image of Him

my mom whispers
a legend to me
of Arizona eyes born 
from alcohol and fuel
baptized in Marine Corps
a transient breeze that blew
through her hair in Okinawa
perhaps only wistfully
she says Goat Rock struck
silent and I only imagine 
the desert span feels
now adrift