WINNING POEMS FROM 4th ANNUAL KAREN TRUJILLO POETRY CONTEST for high school poets in Las Cruces, NM 2025

4th Annual Karen Trujillo Poetry Contest, the winning poems, 2025 Best 9th Grade Poem “Empty Threads” by Arturo Luna EMPTY THREADS But even peace feels so distantWhen I replay the words that tore us apart.The house is quiet, but I feel it,Like the walls are pressing in, but it echoesHeavy with the weight in my […]

2 BORDER POEMS BY TIM STALEY

Rooting for Someone Else’s Roots White plastic bags from Salvation Army drift down El Paso’s Durango Street. What’s inside? A water bottle in a barbed collar? A bar of granola no control over the gambol of its boundaries? A package of dried fruitage no say in its reconstitution? Does refugee come from refuse or refuge? What […]

3 POEMS BY Arvilla Fee

The Irish Way She didn’t own the bar, but she owned the bar, if you know what I mean, the Irish red-haired beauty with light freckled skin and a laugh like windchimes. She could handle a cloth, a mug, a till full of money, a compliment, a come-on, bleary eyes, and brawling fists as if she were […]

SIJRA ~ L’APPEL DU VIDE

L’appel Du Vide ~ Call of the Void What’s a boy to a star who gazes from afar?But a boy lost in reverie, knowing he was bound to be from the start?L’appel du vide.I can be condescending just to feel like I’m ascendingbut still feel like a decline, is the message sending?L’appel du vide.If my […]

Stephen Mead ~ Transition Dreams

Transition Dreams Cab to train to plane to bus—– Where am I? Where? Here is a house but the rooms keep changing. Here all is familiar—– the school, the mall, the ceremonies, the stadium. What have I missed or is it all the session of mid & I just need rewinding? Traveling, strangers traveling, & all that […]

R.C. Hoerter ~ Self-Portrait With Writing a Poem

Self-Portrait With Writing a Poem I used to know what a poem is. And the scream of peacocks used to know me. And what does that mean? Here’s another bird: the snowy egret stands one-legged and silent in flowing creek water, and neither water nor egret knows the difference. My own sharp beak spears old […]

5 POEMS BY ROBERT BEVERIDGE

Arrogate There aretwo waysto makeit work swimin goldfrom LAto Dubai swimin bloodin Seattlein New Yorkagain, in LA either waythe end resultis the sameand whetheryou geta headstoneain’t upto you * * * The Emperor The chair is not anythingthe chair has never been—a bitsprung, threadbare, thinnerthan it was. Yet still it is wherehe sits, against the […]

SARAH HENRY ~ Landscape with Tree

Landscape with Tree To be the worst makes someone very special. Imagine the worst crook, the worst drunk and the worst enemy. They’re all special in their own right. And the worst art history student? I looked at every painting like it was a Rorschach test for hysteria or depression. Logic kills imagination. I studied […]

Claudia Wysocky ~ Unfinished Exit

Unfinished Exit I keep thinking about the time in high school when you drew me a map of the city, I still have it somewhere. It was so easy to get lost in a place where all the trees look the same. And now every time I see a missing person’s poster stapled to a […]

JEFF BURT ~ COYOTE TRUTHS

COYOTE TRUTHS Beauty What is it like, I ask Coyote, to wander in fields of lupine and poppies that dot the dry fields, to never walk a straight line and yet brush against glory? All day I starve and all night I roam, Coyote says. Beauty is to wander through an unwoven fence. Fear What […]

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