2084's Inaugural Annual Poetry Contest
The Future
Our judges and team reviewed over 140 unique poems for our inaugural contest. We believe these selected poems represent our aspirations for the future: peace, happiness, and balance between nature and humanity.
We recommend reading on a laptop or PC instead of mobile due to sentence truncation.
Enjoy.
BIOMIMICRY
Isabelle Wei
Co-Winner
many nights
we walk
late down
a corner street,
leaf litter
glinting
like the lean backs
of needlefish.
from open
stomatal windows:
table noises, tin snare
imitating
subterranean
chatter—
mycelium in
the city’s basement.
already, steel
buildings borrow
from phyllotaxis,
learn self-shade.
through the glass
we glimpse lives
in fragments: a woman
bathing, a man asleep
and outside,
leaves unfurling—
strips of
crinkly pavement:
ant lines, lacewings,
natural traffic.
Isabelle Wei is a writer and artist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Lincoln Review, Poetry South, Passing Notes, VERVE Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Yamabuki Prize and the Evelyn Hart Award, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for Best of the Net. She is currently studying English at Trinity College Dublin and Columbia University.
If We Could Hear
What They Say
Sheryl Clough
—inspired by the trees in The Overstory
Recent research suggests trees have
means to converse with one another,
not with shouts and groans as humans might,
but via more subtle methods, perhaps
impulses sent along root systems,
or intonations carried on a breeze.
Imagine a wise old fir telling a young one,
This will be a great year for cones.
A cedar deep in old growth forest
compliments the trillium at its base.
Madronas growing near a major road say,
That shopping center is too close.
Should we fear, could we hear them,
condemnation of the ruin we’ve caused:
the stripped hillsides now mudslides;
the vanished habitat; the salmon streams
warming without enough shade?
Go out and listen in still night air
to the words whispered at leaf end:
We have faith in ourselves.
We will survive.
Sheryl Clough has worked as a paralegal, whitewater river guide, Upward Bound teacher and college instructor. Her writing reflects many of these experiences. Three chapbooks of her poems have been published, and her full-length collection, River’s Child, seeks a publisher. Sheryl lives in Bellingham, Washington and supports the Whatcom Land Trust and the Whidbey Camano Land Trust.
Co-Winner
Benediction
Barbara Hunt
Co-Winner
We are smugglers, all of us.
For life; this life we were never promised.
How laughable expecting cosmos to deliver
like birthday wishes. Bending to our will.
Meeting our crude plans. Oh, how to know
when strange events have meaning?
In this indifferent world, our hearts must
be small purses. As we with cool palms,
tender fingers gather scavenged stones
and shells. Driftwood, cones and berry-bits
like rapacious magpies to carry tucked in
empty breast pockets like all we’ll have for
sustenance. Our loves and hurts to keep
us real. I’m told before our feet touch
down at daybreak, we should beg reverent
forgiveness of this earth for striding daily
on her back. Being mindful, we must
couch such miracles in pleated pouches
in our faltering chests across all manner
of sanctimonious borders as we go.
Aware that even in darkest, foreign night
we could as if in ritual revive those perfumed
and sacred motes of matter stashed
heart-holy close to pulse. There, quivering
for us as though in piety and prayer.
We must be smugglers, all.
Barbara E. Hunt has publications across North America, UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Australia, France, Germany, resulting in a Pushcart Prize nomination from Swedish publication. Most recently, in Florida, USA, Britain and the Great Lakes area of Canada.
Her climate-change collection Rowing Across the North Atlantic and newest book of tiny poems, What Is Is are available.
The Last Museum
of Gravity
Rebecca Trifari
In the century after borders forgot their names,
children visited the Last Museum of Gravity.
Behind polished glass, a stone.
A rusted key.
A photograph bent by rain.
The guide explained:
People once believed
they could only rise
by standing on someone else.
The children laughed
the way forests laugh at axes left to rust.
Outside, cities grew like mycelium
sharing light,
sharing thirst,
sharing tomorrow.
Every rooftop harvested stars.
Every language kept its own music
and learned the harmonies of others.
No monument honored conquest.
The tallest statues
were empty chairs,
reserved for the next unheard voice.
When evening arrived,
the old stone remained weightless in its case.
Not because gravity had vanished
but because humanity
had finally discovered
that hope weighs less
when everyone carries it.
Rebecca Trifari is a 21-year-old student and writer from Rome, Italy. She’s currently attending New York University where she focuses on Creative Writing and Astrophysics. She aspires to become a thriller and romance novelist but also enjoys writing poetry and songs.
Honorable Mention
