From “Venom Lessons” by Anne Champion
WINNER OF THE MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE
“Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about/ her life?/ The world would split open.’ I indeed felt my world split open as I read Anne Champion. Her poems in VENOM LESSONS are history lessons—the poet’s personal history of rape and trauma as well as the larger history of patriarchal culture. With another Anne (Anne Sexton) as her guide, Champion writes exquisitely crafted poems that are simultaneously raw with emotion in this authentically brutal collection. VENOM LESSONS is an education in what it is like for survivors—no soundbites, just the bite of a poet whose wordplay is direct and devastatingly honest.” –Denise Duhamel, 2026 Contest Judge
PUBERTY
Lust set me off like wide hips bobbing
on the back of a bad boy’s motorcycle.
I can’t tell you when I first knew, but at some point
the idea of being a wild girl clinging
to one of their electric-fenced hearts
and barbed-wire biceps set a wet whistle humming
through my center. Once, the boy down the street
said we should share our secrets. He showed me
burn marks on his arms. I showed him
how to take a bra off without taking off
a shirt; I shimmied it out of my sleeve
and dangled it out the window—gravity
plucked it from my fingers like a prompt butler
and then pulled both of us to the floor.
I’m a broken girl I go with the broken boys, I thought.
I’m a broken doll I go with the broken toys.
THE RAPED GIRL FIGURES IT OUT AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE
how when I was brittle bone wasted,
frail wishbone left out to dry
on a ledge, how when my legs were splayed
like that on some strange man’s
bed, in some dorm room,
in some motel room, in
some mother’s basement,
how when I was sun-drained,
desert-parched, ready to be snapped,
the room spun and spun
and I separated from my body—
I’d slither right out and fall slack
around us like his discarded rubbers,
and I’d just be this body, breaking,
wondering what this one was wishing for.
DENISE DUHAMEL, CONTEST JUDGE: “These manuscripts are excellent and publishable. It’s humbling to know how much good writing is out there….”
From “Rizal Walks Along the Foxgloves” by Eugene Gloria
WINNER OF The ROBERT CREELEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Numbers (a confirmation)
If the head of Rizal is heaven,
then his forehead must furrow
with roads going star to star.
If Rizal’s head is furrowed with roads,
then it must have wind and rain, cold
and heat, fall and summer.
Rizal’s hair must weather the four seasons:
spritzed with hair milk and lace of frost.
The haul and heft of each strand
being quantic and quantifiable.
That, if measured, would equal the five sides
and angles of a man’s skull. We could,
in theory, arrive at the ideal specimen
of homo sapiens: molded with 366 joints,
nine orifices, four limbs, and five viscera.
Each one of us possesses our own arithmetic.
I’ll even hazard a guess and say that
Rizal’s soul is worth an entire constellation.
But if the gods have a say in the matter,
the topography of Rizal’s head is far better
served as the blueprint of King Solomon’s Temple.
If heaven is truly the orbit of man, then the soles
of his feet must blister like our burning Earth.
Numbers (a refutation)
To speak of topography,
ruins, numbers, and temples—
I thought I had a clue.
Forgive me. I was wrong.
It was only a false comfort
in what I heard. Not his body,
but perhaps in transient things,
departed things I gathered in books.
His body where truth resides. I want
to hear, here when being attentive.
To speak of topography,
ruins, numbers, and temples—
I thought I had a clue. Perhaps
I heard his body sing through
the people he touched when
I felt I knew enough to say
here’s Rizal and his miserable toes—
here’s to a flâneur’s forlorn
shoes hand-sewn by elves. Here I close
this topographical parenthesis.
From “I Wanted Everything” by Cassie Burkhardt
WINNER OF THE ROCHELLE RATNER MEMORIAL PRIZE
STUDY ABROAD
His name was Francesco.
He was the first boy who made me coffee
the morning after.
I say boy but he was ten years older,
wore a suit, worked at a bank in Paris.
I say morning, but it was 2 p.m.,
windows flung open,
sheets undone.
I was twenty.
First sex I didn’t want to forget—
no slipping into daylight, mascara running.
He made me a coffee
from the Bialeti on the stove,
poured into a bowl big as my head.
Pour toi, ma belle.
I held it in both hands,
tried to sip slowly—
but it’s hard not to gulp what’s good.
LIFE IN A SUMMER
The sun goes down.
Fog rolls in.
Mist plays on the potato fields.
They can hear the sea in the distance.
It grows louder each year.
Later, sharing a pillow in a twin bed,
they whisper:
Let’s both be teachers when we grow up.
Let’s come back every year to Southampton.
Our children will be best friends.
They scratch each other’s backs,
draw letters, swirls, pictures
until they fall asleep.
Above them—so many stars.
Uncharted nebulae. No gravity.
The excitement and terror in that.
What is friendship for, if not exactly this:
two specks holding hands
inside a galaxy.