Please join us in celebrating with Mary McGinnis, Dimitri Papadopoulos, Steve Fay and Sheila Lynch-Benttinen for their nominations to the 2024 Pushcart Prize.
What is the Pushcart Prize?
(From the Pushcart Prize’s website:)
The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America – including Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.
The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60’s and 70’s.
Our Nominated Poems
Trail Prayer
By Mary McGinnis
Trail, hold me;
trail, herd me forward;
treasure, drop into my hair,
fish, flash, and jump from the lake,
liver, cleanse in your mysterious prison.
Now I lower me onto green sand;
ocean, lake, pocket, let me hear you sing;
goat milk, turn mild and light,
tomatoes, ripen and fall here,
old friend, make room for me on your mat.
burgundy and oak
By Dimitri Papadopoulos
as a boy
i heard the muses
Calliope and Melpomene
whispering
their voices bubbling up
from from the thick
burgundy carpet
in my grandfather’s
living room
we told Homeric tales
with plastic figurines
exploring caverns
beneath an oak end-table
the darkness
beneath the sofa
was an unknowable
otherworld
beside which we waged wars
with marbles
and matchbox cars
that small temple
of burgundy and oak
is lost to me now
yet in quiet moments
of forgetting myself
i still feel
my muses near
silently brushing my cheek
like scarves of raw silk
reminding me
to awaken back
into more innocent ways
of understanding
and so
under a cool
spring moon
i press my ear
to the earth
soft and yielding
after a generous April rain
and listen
to remember
turnings: a suite of poems
By Steve Fay
———-~
awake all night
a scour
beneath north
stars
less
than shadow
less than
chatter
the
poor-will cry
———-~
the plum’s waxy
blue
——-black
beneath
momentary
line
——-in the
palm
——-the con-
fident string
gathering
dry
——-stalks
to flame
———-~
where to drain the
pressings they
were not rich enough
here is the glove
where is the hand
that hand drawn
against a face was it
one morning
mourning over a
pallid sky dry air
breathing can
make you weak
thin cider
———-~
amid sodden dreams
hard to listen
music of broken
mirrors
notes pruned around
wires
near to dawn
vague de-
crease of light
murk of coming
dew
abandonment to
bare stones
gregorian crickets
———-~
fossil
sunrise found when
excavating eden
the amor-
anthe glowing
purple
the distant lightning
acute but
silent no footprints
but deer
where they gnawed
treebark their
scat flecked with
appleseed
———-_ _ _
Equations
By Sheila Lynch-Benttinen
I have choices
as I morph into my spirit body
——–I reminisce about
sweet love in my life
——–joy and transcendence
and heartache by the shards
——–I have decided
as much as I can direct
——–in the remaining ambles
I am going to try to live
——–on the love side of
———————–the equations
I have choices
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