Every Poem I Didn’t Write by Abby E. Murray

When I mop with lemon-scented cleaner

I can smell every poem I’ve never written,

sometimes for days. Our folded clothes

are perfumed with dryer sheets and poems

I haven’t written, and when I pour the liquid

purple Tylenol into its measuring spoon,

it pools like an unmade poem. At school,

my daughter eats peanut butter and jelly

and poems I haven’t written sandwiches

because without them, she would become

lightheaded, unable to write poems.

Yesterday, the poem I didn’t write was

delivered to my house by accident in a box

the size of a wheelchair, which UPS said

I could throw away or drive to the correct

recipient if I felt like it, and I drove it

across town because the return address was,

in fact, a wheelchair manufacturer, meaning

I had two options: don’t write this poem,

or destroy a stranger’s wheelchair.

My car is large enough to transport all

my uncreated poems. I live in a house

built on a slab of poems I didn’t write,

and both my husband’s name and mine

are on the mortgage. Perhaps unintentionally,

we’re raising our marriage and a child

on that foundation, all those poems

I haven’t written, and from the street

you can’t see any cracks beneath the brick.

Every poem I didn’t write has radicalized

someone, brought a dead thing back to life.

The poems I don’t write show up

on my mammograms each year, on pap smears,

on birth control prescriptions and condom

wrappers, pink razor blades and tampons.

When I had an MRI done on my neck,

the doctor found arthritis and thousands

of poems that had yet to be written, bulging

and herniated between each vertebra.

She pointed at my unwritten poems

on the screen and showed me how

they were compressing nerves she called

important. The poems I didn’t write

are, in my doctor’s words, significant,

and I only have so long to address them before

they spread, before they become inoperable. 

Whatever by Sarah Freligh

The orange cat showed up at my back door this morning

howling for food. He’s cross-eyed, maybe blind

and definitely homeless. Tough in this summer

of rough weather, but he shelters in the shade

of a chaise lounge or curls up under the derelict

Cadillac in a neighbor’s driveway. Rain again here

and in Houston for a fifth day, turning freeways

into moats on which a flotilla of boats helmed by a navy

of ragtag volunteers sail out daily to pluck those treading

water, high and still rising. Everyone’s a stray at heart,

one storm from the street. Call me a crazy cat lady:

He believes I’m Jesus when I feed him. No loaves,

but plenty of fishes. The cans multiply. Maybe faith

hollows you out, open to whatever will fill you. _____________________________________________________

2023 Winners:

o “Every Poem I Didn’t Write” by Abby E. Murray

o “Whatever” by Sarah Freligh

LGBTQplus Director’s Cut:

 o “The Talking Night” by Bryan Borland

o “Marie Curie’s Notebooks Are Still Radioactive”

         by Michael Montlack

 Finalists:

 “Erasing a Cloud Full of Atoms” by Terese Svoboda

“Whosiana” by Lee Rossi

“This girl asked me a too-personal question in the bathroom last night:” by Max Stone

“Age Report“ by Tracey Knapp

“Nova” by Michael Miller

“Divorce” by Rebecca Faulkner

“Agency“ by KC Trommer

“Save a Life” by Jennifer D. Michael