“Jimmy was staying overnight. Dad had picked us up after the freezing high school football game. At first, Mom’s cocoa was too hot to drink, but it cooled off while Jimmy and I took turns guessing a girl’s name. We fell asleep eventually on the army cots Mom had set up in my room.”

-From “For Almost a Year, I Stopped Everything” by Paul Dickey

“The house smells of ammonia. It’s the smell of zoos and pet shops, of places where they keep wild animals in close quarters. On the kitchen island I find a heap of bills, letters, bags of dog food, poems or the attempts at poems. A ferret darts under a trash bag. Field mice shiver beneath a pile of dirty clothes. Hard to say whether a person has broken in or the animals have broken out.”

-From “Flight Patterns” by  Grand Prize Winner David Norman

“My wife, Mariuccia, she has the high blood pressure, she coughs all the time, always she clears her throat and blows her nose, sometimes she keeps me awake at night with all her noise. She should go to the doctor when I tell her, but she doesn’t listen. Now she has chronic sinusitis. She doesn’t take good care of herself the way I do.”

-From “Tangled Up in Blue” by Grand Prize Winner Laura Fonda Hochnadel

“For then she might have understood that we are owed nothing, that the world asks permission of no one, and then she might never have given herself to him, that sad and terrible man with the rainwater eyes, the one who loved her better and harder than you, than anyone. She might’ve settled for the quiet boy, for morning chores and afternoon cigarettes, for every once in a while rolling up her jeans and wading barefoot in the cold river beneath the stars.”

-From “On Oblivion” by Grand Prize Winner Joe Wilkins

“Things started to fall apart the year the girl was murdered up on Pig Road, little more than a rutted trail, and along it the charred remains of a pig farm that had burned down so many years before that no one remembered.  My sisters and I played there, among the ruins, inside the blackened cement foundation, digging around for treasures: canning jars, leather shoes, pieces of cloth we folded and stuck in our pockets.

The rest of the road was undeveloped; woods on one side, marsh on the other.  The air was heavy with a rot that made us feel drunk as we ran through the weeds, our legs scratched and bitten beneath the cheap shorts we wore.”

-From “Pig Road” by Grand Prize Winner Cinthia Ritchie

“’Calm down or you’re not gonna play.’  I know he won’t continue to wiggle and risk exclusion.  I’m right.  While Oklahoma’s winter winds plead against the windows, he is quiet.  He awaits instruction.  ‘We are playing Slap the Face.’  He looks confused.  ‘I’ll go first,’ I continue.  He looks a tiny bit terrified.”

-From “What I Did to the Littlest” by Grand Prize Winner Jess Wigent

“At the bottom, the name is all the gestures he has in him and presents to the world.  Who is this man, at root, to go so carelessly into the New World with this new name?  The title seems to have reconciled a silent deal that was made at Ellis Island.  It was the last balance to be transferred.  You agreed, Frank Torch.  You walked away from the inspection desk and into Manhattan with it.  You wandered into the Lower West Side with it among other peoples, tall buildings, small crowded streets.  Frank Torch fit all the possibilities of the here and now.”

–From “The Naming of Frank Torch” by Grand Prize Winner Rafael Torch

“I am returning to Laos.  It is 1993.  I lived here as a child, a ten-year-old transplant from an Oregon farm.  It was 1963.  As the wing of the plane dips right, I press my head against the window.  I see the silver snake of the Mekong, see rice fields of dry gold, see coconut palms that cluster near villages, see roads of burnt orange.  I am home.”

–From “The Warp of Memory” by  Grand Prize Winner Nancy Penrose.

“When I was a toddler, I used to gather minute pieces of lint off the front lawn and bring them to my father, who would happily stuff them in his navel. I know this is true, because I’ve seen it on home movies:  Me, pudgy, intent, butt-up in the green grass, retrieving something too small for the camera to record; him in a lounge chair, seeming to examine it, tucking it into his navel, and giving me a big grin.  Well, some of us are Daddy’s girls or aspire to be, and if lint was what it took, lint it would be.”

–From “The Thread of God”  by Grand Prize Winner Candy B.K. Schille