Poems for Persons of Interest

 This is a place where I'll be publishing the sort of poems I like -- often that will mean formal poems, but not always. Send me poems you think are of interest to anrettie@gmail,com.

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Winning Poem: 12-Hour Sonnet Contest

I am pleased to announce that Maya Clubine is the winner of the first 12-Hour Sonnet Contest for her poem "Sun Inside My Brain."  Maya is a Canadian writer and MFA candidate at the University of St. Thomas (TX). Her chapbook Life Cycle of a Mayfly won the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Prize. You can find her and her work at mayaclubine.ca .  Sun Inside My Brain There was a little light show in my head, my vision clouded by persistent spots. No fractured skull or artery that bled, only peripheral light and distant dots exploding into fireworks of blue, and green, and red. It was as though my thoughts precariously hung like drops of dew, translucent and too small, distorting all that they contained they dripped things I once knew. I saw myself through glass. I can recall light growing into sun inside my brain, and then a rumbling like the car might stall, a ray of black behind a stroke of pain, and then what struck me as some kind of rain.
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Bring Out Your Dead! A Halloween Sonnet Contest

 If there's one thing that gets the words flowing, it's death. And with tomorrow being Halloween, the day after All Saints Day, and November 11 Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, and/or Veterans Day, no time could be better for a contest focused on those we have lost. Another day coming up shortly is US election day, and writing a sonnet will help get your mind off all that. Between 12:01 am and 11:59 pm EDT, October 31, 2024: Send a word doc or pdf with one or more sonnets to anrettie@gmail.com.  Send $5 Canadian for each sonnet submitted to   paypal.me/AlexanderRettie OR if you're in Canada, save us both fees and e-transfer to anrettie@gmail.com. By 11 am EST November 5, I will announce a winner, who will receive 50% of the submission fees! All contestants will be contacted by email. I'll publish the winner and any other sonnets I like here by 9 pm EST, November 5 -- to give you some fun news no matter how the US election goes. Guidelines I'm not going to quibble abo
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Winning Poem: 12-Hour Couplets Contest

I am pleased to announce that Ella Harrigan is the winner of the 12-Hour Couplets Contest for her poem "Mother."  Ella Harrigan is a poet and student at Swarthmore College, where she is a senior editor at the magazine Small Craft Warnings . She was the 2020 Virginia Ball Creative Writing Competition winner, the 2021 Claudia Ann Seaman winner in nonfiction, and has been published in Polyphony Lit and the Swarthmore Review. Mother yes, imagine it. what, on accident, i took from you. the apartment bright and piled with books   rising from the floor like hills. flowers from a friend on the windowsill.   and you, in the shower, humming, washing your hair. your beautiful long hair.   imagine me unborn, my brother sitting in his old bedroom, home for the summer, picking his nails. his guitar untuned.   you love him. the red that shines through his beard reminds you of your father. the rest isn't clear.   in the kitchen, your mother calling on the pho
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Winning Poem, 12-Hour Carol Contest: Alchemists' Hymn, D.W. Baker

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I am pleased to announce that the winner of the 12-Hour Carol Contest is D.W. Baker, for "Alchemists' Hymn."  D.W. Baker is a poet, father, and teacher from St. Petersburg, Florida. His work appears in Identity Theory, The Pierian,  and  Voidspace Zine , and has been nominated for Best of the Net. He reads for several mastheads including  Variant Lit . See more of his work at  www.dwbakerpoetry.com .
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12-Hour Carol Contest: Let Us Praise the Autumn Birds, Ben Morgan

Ben Morgan is a writer based in London, UK. His sequence  Medea in Corinth: Poems, Prayers, Letters, and a Curse ,  is published by Poetry Salzburg. It retells the myth through poems, spells and songs. He has also published poems at The High Window, Oxford Poetry, Alchemy Spoon, One Hand Clapping, Stand and elsewhere.  Let Us Praise the Autumn Birds   Praise The boring autumn birds Of Regent's Park. Their beaks like spoons Scoop honey light From sepia lawns at dawn. Their quiet cannot be drowned out By Baker Street. Their wings - fieldfare, mistle thrush, sparrow, tern - Never - barely - glow nor burn, Would win no medals From Paris, but praise, Now, their glamorous subtlety, Whose bashful glories Nest like jealousy By Chester Terrace. The same intensities Riot in their breasts As in the eagle's, So commend their wise restraint, To leave those glassy lakes A bloodless grey. Winged September peonies! Bob-headed ambassadors Of fan
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