2025 Open Poetry Contest Winners
Thank you to everyone who entered our fifth-annual poetry contest! And special thanks to our guest judge, Lisa Fay Coutley!
Congratulations to all the winners and honorable mentions!
First Place:
Alicia Rebecca Myers
"Soufflé"
I cried as a child on the wide strand of Myrtle Beach after the ocean took away
my name I’d written in the sand with a shell, lettered olive I later learned and retained,
since language matters in issues of lastingness. Once, your grandfather surprised me
with a horseshoe crab in a motel bathtub. When he flipped it upside down to reveal
its legs by its mouth, I recognized how I would always be trying
to outrun this singular life with spellbound words.
You microwave chocolate and drizzle it on plates, and I think, Desert chef,
in mind of a seamless macaron melting in the sand and far from any town. My life
is about the opposite: wanting to create what will survive awhile, to preserve
the occasional tangs that emanate from my strange, animate brain.
Maybe in the future, I’ll hover my spoon over a ramekin of perfectly-risen
bittersweet soufflé imperceptibly falling back on itself every second,
and I’ll beam at you, an adult now, before devouring
what you made so carefully.
Alicia Rebecca Myers's poetry has appeared in publications that include River Styx, Sixth Finch, and Frozen Sea. Her poem “On the Anniversary of My Due Date, You Ask to Braid My Hair” won the 2025 Cantor Poetry Prize. Her first full-length manuscript, Warble, was chosen as winner of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize (Meadowlark Press) and was published in January 2025.
Second Place:
Victoria Bogatz
"Wearing Pink & Talking Politics"
it is the year of our lord 2025
and there are three of us
living like it’s the end:
cynical seniors so close
you could call us sisters.
we sit on the back stairs
of our high-fallen high school
improvising stories like we’re
drunk at a comedy club
and the ponytailed teachers walking to their cars
are our audience.
what are those girls doing–
we are criticizing the government
over lunch,
spilling quinoa and broccoli onto the
grimy purple tables.
we are bending hardbacks backwards
between the stacked library shelves
decrying gender roles as we pull out
john green, neal shusterman, those
plastic jackets crinkling
look it’s the new elizabeth acevedo–
we are arguing about thrifting, libertarianism and
trickle-down economics
in the sticky midwest heat,
backpacks digging into our broken bodies.
we are talking about love and taylor swift.
we are spilling sprinkles because we’re dancing
so wildly. we are scrawling save the earth on cut-up
boxes for the rally next week. we are dragging our
bleeding bodies through the bright school hallways,
icy walls dripping with posters that hawk
hope and kindness
like some kind of commodity
can’t escape capitalism even here–
we are laughing like hell unleashed
laughing until we go empty, until the sunlight slips, until our sides split
with sunflowers
we sound crazy, you know–
we write on old english worksheets that we are
the revolution: a synonym for anxious,
obnoxious teenagers wading our way through
this wild and woeful world.
Victoria Bogatz is an eighteen-year-old environmental activist, student journalist, and current Nebraska Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been honored by the Nebraska Scholastic Writing Awards, the Opera Omaha Poetry & Music Project, and the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest, among others. She can be found on social media @victoriabogatzwrites.
Third Place:
Rita Tiwari
"As If It Could"
Maybe it was out in the dark, sharp air,
on your popular back porch,
where we always ended up because
you were a smoker, where
I’d follow you and pretend to smoke too;
maybe you took one step,
and a second
toward me as I squeezed my red Solo cup
and tried not to look besotted;
maybe then you lifted the steel beads
of my necklace, not quite touching
my skin with your fingertips,
saying something like
That’s a cool necklace,
I’ve never seen one like that before.
Maybe you felt the tipsy tender
breath catch in my chest.
That night we met, you perched leisurely
on the kitchen counter reading a newspaper
throughout the party, a bandana tied
around your head—you looked, good god,
so much like my ex. Back then I couldn’t
resist a quiet man: someone with a keen
cuspate mind who subscribed
to The Economist, majored in Poli Sci.
No talk between us of my love
for science fiction—just politics,
GRE prep; a practical, difficult flirtation.
If anyone asked, I professed: Can’t stand him.
And they believed me, because it was true.
But there was something else,
something about those stupid suspenders
and the way you’d say say
like an old-timey gangster; something
about your impossible tan skin (how could
it be, since you were Russian?)
that I wanted to dismantle,
ignite. And, Christ, all these years
later here I am, writing a poem
about you. Or perhaps about me:
How I walked the budding world
aching to make every beautiful mistake;
what it was like to be young,
not yet twenty, and riven with
possibility; how I exercised
the freedom to choose helpless,
hapless longing. Throwing
myself into it as if it could catch
me. As if it could even see me.
Rita Tiwari is a poet and fiction writer. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Portland Review, CALYX, Whale Road Review, and others. Her writing is inspired by urban landscapes, film noir, and mythology. She holds a Master of Arts in Writing from Portland State University and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University.
Honorable Mentions:
in no particular order
David Icenogle
"Symmetrization"
I used to live like a sea star, a salamander,
as if when I lost something
it would grow back.
I planted seeds in my wounds, waiting for the bloom
to break through the scabs,
even stubborn enough to water my scars.
I could only align living
and what was missing
when I learned symmetrization.
A survival phenomenon of young moon jellyfish,
a rose gold soap bubble with
a skirt of bioluminescent eye lashes.
They must be symmetrical to move
and eat, with all eight
of their arms working in balance.
When I realized what was gone
and not coming back,
I couldn’t move,
I ate what only left me empty.
The trauma phantom limb syndrome,
feeling the pain of the past presently
while everyone else only saw a stump.
The invisible arm reaches into me
and the specter of my hand clenches my heart.
Scientists severed two arms from a moon jelly,
cut from the gut.
Like a younger me
they expected them to grow again
because it was heal
or die.
The veiny cellophane dancing in the deep
would never rearm from the harm
but learned to live
and shock those who predicted it to perish.
Contracting itself,
the jelly strenuously shuffled
the remaining appendages like a daisy
making itself whole
in the places petals were pulled off.
Surviving through symmetry,
I became a student of the moon jellyfish.
First adopting its transparency,
bearing myself bare,
while I was glowing with grief,
hoping those would love what’s remained of me.
Learning through loss,
that healing
is less about getting back what’s lost
but living with what’s left.
Ann Richmond
"Whatever It Was"
Whatever it was I had just missed
smelled of white pepper, mushrooms, hay
scuffing down the beach, city gone quiet
except for the gulls, who were really not so bad
like my post shift arrival at midnight parties,
hungry for transition to whatever next world
there was left to be had, bombs
in the news, evening already analyzed.
I brought salt butter and bread
from the night bake, a good ending
everyone agreed while pecking, noting
that sand smells different at night
like signs from the dead, or forgetting
wind on your face then remembering.
David Icenogle is the author of the books At Least the Pain is Cheap and You Are Not Alone. He co-hosts the podcast "Shoeless in South Dakota" and makes comedy sketches, which you can find all over social media just by searching his very strange last name.
Ann Richmond Garrett is a Midwest poet tucked into the Northwoods between two lakes. Her poems have appeared in the Bear River Review, at local poetry slams, and elsewhere. Her work focuses on the fabric of people, and she is currently working on a manuscript. When not writing, she divides her time between public library work and other woodsy distractions.
All poems were judged blind and no poet received any special treatment or unfair advantage. Membership in the Nebraska Poetry Society was not required to enter the contest.