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2025 First Poem Contest Winners

Congratulations to the winners of our First Poem Contest! The poems were selected by guest Judge J.D. Scrimgeour. The poems will be on the Mass Poetry Website ahead of the Festival, and come see the poets on Friday night, May 30th at our opening event! Thank you to everyone who submitted!

Winner

“love poem in the form of a lesson plan” 

By Anna Deloia 

welcome          welcome!
welcome: there are snacks along the wall
and you can help yourself any time.
you can make any noises
that feel good. you can stretch
out like a planet on the rug.
are we ready? today, we are going to make
a road by lying in the grass
until it grows around our bodies.
it might take a while. you can take a nap
if you need to. do a little wiggle.
today, we are going to make 8.2 billion
pairs of glasses. we’ll start with the bottom windows
of the skyscrapers, and no one will notice
at the tops. we are going to unpick the maps
to find out who they serve. ask the borders:
what else will you be?           what else will you be?
I’m sorry, I don’t have the answers. I have granola bars.
come with me to the bookshelf and let’s pull
everything down! you can make a mess.
you can say shit and fuck all this!
tell your neighbor they deserve the world
but not this one. I know you’ve seen the videos.
tell me: is what you remember most the child
or the gun? tell me: is there still a reason
for utopia? if we stuff it in a quilt, will it keep us warm?
if we shove it in the ground, will it form a spring?
this is not a test: you can ask your grandma. you can ask
a drag queen. you can ask the kid with eyes wide and hands
everywhere. do a another, medium-sized wiggle.
today, we are going to make the screens back into sand.
today, we are going to make the books back into birds. is it true what Wendell said: there are no unsacred places, only
sacred places and desecrated places?
there will not be any homework.
you can sing to yourself in whatever languages
you mourn in. you can run away.
you can yell at me; I’ll be here.
you can look at your phone – but try not to
doom-scroll. you can watch the planes.
you can ask them to stop shooting.
it might take a while.            you can take a break
whenever you need to.

Anna Lucia Deloia is a White, queer writer, educator, and researcher. She has a PhD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she is co-founder of the intergenerational education initiative Imagining More Just Futures. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Midway Journal, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Love is For All of Us [Storey Publishing]. Her debut poetry chapbook, of god and merriment both, is available from Bottlecap Press.
Anna Lucia Deloia is a White, queer writer, educator, and researcher. She has a PhD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she is co-founder of the intergenerational education initiative Imagining More Just Futures. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Midway Journal, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Love is For All of Us [Storey Publishing]. Her debut poetry chapbook, of god and merriment both, is available from Bottlecap Press.

Honorable Mentions

“Afterlife”
By Theadora Siranian

I prostrate myself before you, world that has made me

mediocre. My face again peeled and left by the door, I am

down on all fours at dusk—the only animal in a darkening room.

 

In my twenties I once stepped from my apartment into the rain

and for a moment a crushed beer can on the sidewalk

was a dead bird, tiny and slick, and my guts dropped in terror.

 

I’ve been trying to write about it this entire time—that brief

moment when the uncanny overcame all sense. World, I acquit

my ego. I ablate myself, my silly little arrogant self. I am ugly

 

and I am humbled and I have finally learned to lie. I am nothing

but a creature ensnared, hobbled by my basest desires. When I

was fifteen my father and I walked into a beachside tourist shop

 

and straight into a table display of baby shark corpses encased

in jars. The memory makes me so sick I’ve never been able

to say it aloud before now. Language is insufficient. Watching

 

my father watch me—the indescribable look on his face.

At first sight I had thought they were only candy. I want now,

world, to be surprised by nothing. To not halt walking

 

to work the morning after the election in amazement

of the steeplejack still leaning his spindly ladder against

the tambour of the orthodox church, still preparing

 

for his climb to repair the onion dome painted the exact

aching hue as the crystalline heavens pinned mercilessly

behind. I somehow could not but stop and marvel. Damn you.

 

I am still beleaguered by ceaseless, wanton longing—

I do not want to endure this alone. This world estranged

from logic, so fucking inhospitable to love. And my heart,

 

once a thumping fist, now just a grimy palm begging.

Theadora Siranian is a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Review, CONSEQUENCE Magazine, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2013, she was a finalist for The Poet’s Billow Pangaea Prize, and in 2014 was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small Orange Journal. Her chapbook, She, was released by Seven Kitchens Press in May 2021.
Theadora Siranian is a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Review, CONSEQUENCE Magazine, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2013, she was a finalist for The Poet’s Billow Pangaea Prize, and in 2014 was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small Orange Journal. Her chapbook, She, was released by Seven Kitchens Press in May 2021.

“New Neighbors”
By Amy Rothschild

Scribbled with green milkweed and gold foxtails,
three purple flowers, uncommonly purple,

violet and magenta, open like delicate horns,
crane toward the street which is sunlight.

They come from next door’s scraggly thicket,
before that, bellies of ships and hulls of birds,

warm soil of pink and orange tropics.
Scientific name Ipomoea, family Convolvulaceae.

The stories the morning glories and I could tell,
generations thrust toward Eastern Massachusetts,

dry patch of yard, a porch green like dull ocean.
Small talk thick with the bristle of politics and religion.

A woodpecker harmonizes with a jackhammer.
At the end of our street, rusty dinosaurs

drop a grumble and plunk of steel beams
becoming office park, becoming biotech.

How to explain to the morning glories
the soon silver palace.

How people will pour into those dark startups
like sunlight.

How the startups will have names
like Ipomea.

Amy Wise Rothschild’s poetry has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, ONEART, and Maudlin House, among others. Her creative non-fiction is forthcoming in The Potomac Review and Unbroken. The 2024 winner of the Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Poetry, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Amy Wise Rothschild’s poetry has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, ONEART, and Maudlin House, among others. Her creative non-fiction is forthcoming in The Potomac Review and Unbroken. The 2024 winner of the Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Poetry, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Longlist

“Closer Than Skin”

By Janet Aalfs

Although they are

Only breath…

               Sappho

I watched my sister at the ceilidh

embrace a woman closer than skin

home from college then gone again

she left behind in a book

three syllables that dared

though only breath to shimmer

like wind through a door ajar

blows it open to the scent

of ocean mist and beach rose

I could hear when she returned

born again to save me from

lesbian that burning

her silence shattered

moonlit waves on sand

when she chose to end her song

silvery cobalt sound between

the breaking not a sound

but an echo from her wings

softer than the softest flower

Janet E. Aalfs, poet laureate of Northampton, MA (2003-2005), and founder/director of Lotus Peace Arts at Heron's Bridge, a non-profit community school, is a poet, performer, educator, dancer, and master instructor of Karate, Filipino Stick Arts, and Taiji/ Qigong. Creator of Poemotion, spoken word woven with martial arts based dance, Janet has been a presenter at many events including Mass Poetry, the Dodge Poetry Festival, Split This Rock, and Guga S'Thebe in Cape Town, South Africa. Janet's third full-length poetry collection, What the Dead Want Me to Know, appeared in 2022. Her writing has been published widely.
Janet E. Aalfs, poet laureate of Northampton, MA (2003-2005), and founder/director of Lotus Peace Arts at Heron’s Bridge, a non-profit community school, is a poet, performer, educator, dancer, and master instructor of Karate, Filipino Stick Arts, and Taiji/ Qigong. Creator of Poemotion, spoken word woven with martial arts based dance, Janet has been a presenter at many events including Mass Poetry, the Dodge Poetry Festival, Split This Rock, and Guga S’Thebe in Cape Town, South Africa. Janet’s third full-length poetry collection, What the Dead Want Me to Know, appeared in 2022. Her writing has been published widely.

“Western Mass”

By Gray Davidson Carroll

Here I am again, unable to write a poem without putting you at the center. Unable to write anything without the feeling of water around me. Without the rotting leaf & fermenting apple, the backroads leading nowhere & dust kicked up from forgotten farm fields. I cannot write this poem without the clay I gathered from the creek bed as a child, without the sugar maples we tapped for syrup or the dark blue truck that became, for a few short weeks each year, the Sap Ship carrying us to the next tree. Here, the pawpaw, the raspberries picked into used yogurt containers and blueberries eaten straight from the bush. Here too, the asparagus stands at the end of every driveway, the air smelling always of manure and dirt. Here, the public library open two days a week for a total of ten hours, the used bookstore I would lose myself in every day of summer. Here, summer days so hot everyone decides to skip work and go swimming instead. Here, the nude beach where the queers can be found every day of summer regardless of work. Here, skinny-dipping in February and ice frozen in my hair. Here, the hills I biked down at 6:00 am singing at the tops of my lungs. Hear the river, where I first learned my love of water. Here, the woodstove where I wrote my first poem. Here, the ball field, where, under a full moon, because this is a poem and the moon has to have been full, I kissed a man and for the first time, did not call myself unclean. Here, the lake I have come to after every heartbreak, the woods where I first saw my father cry. Here, my love, who calls me to say, drop whatever you’re doing and go look at the moon, and who has, somehow, put up with me writing love poems since the very first date and reading to them for hours on end. Here garlic cloves crushed and eaten whenever someone has a cold. Here, the stinging nettles my mother and I harvested each spring for pesto and tea, the taste of pre-dawn coffee and the way morning lifts itself, like a shawl from the mountains. And I cannot end this poem without the squelch of mud between my toes, without the stink of skunk cabbage, fluff from the milkweed pods or the root-beer-taste of black birch between teeth. I cannot end this poem without the smell of woodsmoke in my hair, without the cattails and dogbane, hemlocks and oak. I cannot end this poem without running into someone I know in the grocery store and stopping to talk for fifteen minutes no matter how much of a rush I am in. I cannot end this poem without the graveyard where I laid my virginity to rest, or the singers who have gathered on the town common for an hour every day since March of 2020 to remember, together, how to sing the soul back to the body. And I cannot end this poem with the garden of my body only now bursting into bloom. And I will not end this poem

Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Common, ONLY POEMS, and elsewhere. They are a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, a CDC John R. Lewis Freedom Scholar, and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.
Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Common, ONLY POEMS, and elsewhere. They are a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, a CDC John R. Lewis Freedom Scholar, and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.

“I come from a line of women”

By Kristin Marie

I come from a long line of women
I come from a long line PT 2
Kristin Marie is a writer from New England whose poetry has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Cathexis Northwest, and an anthology by Purple Ink Press.
Kristin Marie is a writer from New England whose poetry has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Cathexis Northwest, and an anthology by Purple Ink Press.

“To my mother”

By Carmen Barefield 

To my mother
Carmen Barefield (she/her) is a poet and writer living in Salem, Massachusetts. She is also a fellow of Roots. Wounds. Words. and The Watering Hole. Some of her work can be found in Voicemail Poems, The Elevation Review, Popshot Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, and Poetry Quarterly. You can find out more about her at carmenbarefield.com.
Carmen Barefield (she/her) is a poet and writer living in Salem, Massachusetts. She is also a fellow of Roots. Wounds. Words. and The Watering Hole. Some of her work can be found in Voicemail Poems, The Elevation Review, Popshot Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, and Poetry Quarterly. You can find out more about her at carmenbarefield.com.