Women’s Poetry Contest Winners 2024

Kelsay Books is honored to announce the winners
of our 2024 Women’s Poetry Contest!

Marilyn L. Taylor (1st Place)

“On Realizing, Late in Life, That My Mother Was Jewish”

Methuselah something. Something something Ezekiel.
—Albert Goldbarth

So that explains it, I say to myself.
And for one split second, I confront
the mirror like a Gestapo operative—
narrow-eyed, looking for the telltale hint,

the giveaway (lips? the eyebrow calibration?)—
something visible that could account
for this—a lucid, simple explication
of my life story and its denouement.

It seems the script that I was handed
long ago, with all its blue-eyed implications,
can now be seen as something less than candid—
a laundry list of whoppers and omissions.

It’s time for something else to float
back in from theology’s deep end: the strains,
perhaps, of A-don o-lam, drowning out
the peals of Jesus the Conqueror Reigns,

inundating the lily and the rose,
stifling the saints (whose dogged piety
never did come close, God knows,
to cause even a ripple of anxiety).

I’m only waiting for the revelation
on its way this minute, probably—
the grand prelude to my divine conversion,
backlit with ritual and pageantry.

But nothing happens. Not a thing. No song,
no shofar, no compelling Shabbat call
to prayer—no signal that your heart belongs
to David rather than your old familiar, Paul.

Where does a faithless virgin go from here,
after being compromised by two
competing testimonies to thin air—
when both of them are absolutely true?

The author, discovering that her life has an alternative religious tradition, considers embracing it to the exclusion of her first one, but ends by accepting both. I loved the writer’s technical mastery, the use of rhyme and off-rhyme, the originality of much of the phrasing, and a final verse that really “stuck the landing.”

—Gail White, 2024 Judge

Catherine Chandler (2nd Place)

“What You Kept”

A mildewed trunk defending old receipts,
a cookie tin,
carpets, mismatched pillowcases, sheets.
Easy enough, as are the Mason jars—
stuff for the trash or the recycling bin,
the church bazaars.
I toss aside what’s always needled me—
that plaque from John Paul’s Holy Jubilee,
those Norman Rockwell mugs, the Kinkade prints . . .

From underneath
a roll of batting and a bolt of chintz
I pull a faded ribbon-festooned box.
Inside, my fairy-stolen baby teeth
and first-shorn locks
acknowledge, in an elegant goodbye,
that I was once the apple of your eye.

In an elegant nonce form (a not-quite sonnet of 16 lines), the author creates a non-sentimental but powerful image of bereavement, as a daughter finds the unexpected among her mother’s belongings. The varying line lengths and complex rhyme scheme attracted me to this at once.

—Gail White, 2024 Judge

Joanna Hoffman (Honorable Mention)

“Ghazal for the Living”

Can you believe cancer starts as a cell misfiring, stray bullet to start a war?
The tumor is a red moon rising, swollen crater at the heart of war.

The highest frequency of grief is blameless, insomnia and a broken wail,
The best you can do is bear witness, learn to make art from war.

Heaven is a field of ghosts who never stopped loving you,
They rush forward as a tide to catch what’s strewn apart from war.

Wash the sigh from the voicemail, hang the wince by the door
You can dodge the draft but you’ll never outsmart the war.

Forever my mother’s voice calling, Joanna,
where are you sweetheart? With you, at war.

Erika Takacs (Honorable Mention)

“I want to die like the woman who asked her two best friends to sleep over”

as she lay still but smiling, concave
in the sheets. They snuggled for hours
beside her in fuzzy pajamas, painted
each other’s fingernails fire-engine red,
fake-swooned over the leather-spice scent
of old crushes. They spread a table on the bed,
placed slivers of steak on her swollen tongue,
poured her a thimbleful of red wine, stayed
until silence. I do not want to end this life
like my mother—adrift, undone, emptied
of all that had shined in her, last breath spent
saying I’m sorry for being such a burden.
Some days I would die just
to tell her she was only ever beautiful.

The winners of the 2024 Women’s Poetry Contest will be published in the Summer 2025 issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal.

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the 2024 contest, including our shortlisted poets:

Meredith Bergman, “Keeping Time”
Elizabeth Bullmer, “Let Me Explain the Grieving Process”
Daun Daemon, “By flowers”
Nicole Farmer, “Fall Turning”
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, “My Mother Knows She’ll Get Used to the Electric Stove in Time”
Mary Hills Kuck, “To Future Generations”
Peggy Landsman, “May Hera Help Us”
Nancy Lubarsky, “Tattoos”
Marjorie Maddox, “Insomnia/Somnolence”
Kathy O’Fallon, “Ode to My Index Finger”
Carolyn Raphael, “Compound Words in Motion”
Myra Shapiro, “The Arc of Your Foot on My Foot”
Michelle Stephens, “Postpartum”
Jennifer Stewart, “Caesura (Part One)”
Jovan Virag, “The Oak in the Mirror”
Lorrie Wolfe, “It’s About Time”