This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, we will be featuring the winners from last month’s flash contest, held in conjunction with the AWP festival in Portland. Entries were received in paper form during the three days of the book fair, and selected by our full editorial team. 

You are some off-kilter sepia sky        strewn

in sun and waves        and rock, you couldn’t be

more original, could you? Time plus terrain                May

1990                  with no name—some hollow coordinate

in context, This             paper a missing I can touch manufactured

by Kodak. And all         I know is this: your wooden

oar, your rocky              spores as the Hubble

sent its first photograph           from space, your spraying

cold as a child                may or may not have                burnt lifeless

taking off        in the Philippines, some faceless        figure behind

the camera, the sun uncircled             by Ulysses. These things left

in desk drawers. And I suppose          I’ll keep

this sighing strip          of somewhere, sighing

because it knows          I can’t.

—

Emma DePanise’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in journals such as Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, The National Poetry Review, Plume Poetry, Superstition Review and elsewhere. She is a 2019 winner of an AWP Intro Journals Award and the 2018 winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate at Purdue University and is an editor at The Shore, an online poetry journal.