Competition. Congratulations!  The judges were especially impressed with your poem “Resume.”

Your work was judged to be on a world-class level in a remarkably international field. We received submissions from 13 different countries this year, a record!  From Singapore to Australia, Mexico to the Russian Federation, Poetry 2026 was truly a global celebration of the art of poetry.  There were over 200 entries and more than 1000 separate poems.

As an International Merit Award winner, your name will appear on a page of honor in the Fall Contest Issue. You will receive a free copy of this issue. And, although this manuscript was not selected for a publication prize this year, your chances in the future will clearly be excellent.

Thank you for sharing your work with us.  We look forward to hearing from you next year!  

Résumé

 

It doesn’t say on my résumé, how many times my heart has been broken or what it felt like when my daughter died and that, when I lost my biggest dog, I didn’t know how to move him. Not only did I not know how to move him, I didn’t know where to put him. That’s kind of like what grief is, you don’t know where to put it all the time. Sometimes it bursts out of you like a squeezed grape or other times it settles on top of your head and then seeps inside like a low-grade fever that you can’t shake. It doesn’t say on my résumé all the times I’ve fallen down. And it doesn’t say if there’s anybody there to help me up. I know now that I don’t have that much farther to go on the runway, so I’m careful not to fall. I would still like to be brave. What you learn about grief is that it belongs to you and you alone and you need to cover it most of the time when you’re out in the real world. When I say this, I think of the women in Iran, who are refusing to cover their heads, and I feel like rushing over there and putting things on their heads so they’ll be safe, and no one will be imprisoned or shot. I tell this to people who have lost someone and some of the time they look at me sadly. I don’t really care what people think anymore because I just don’t and because of this I find suddenly I have many more friends and interesting people in my life. I wonder often if I could bottle this and sell it and make a bundle. The idea of making a bundle is enticing. In my advanced age there’s nothing that I want so I would give it all away and that would be the most fun part. I think I’m writing from my child self today. I could be older; I could be young. I don’t wonder anymore how old I will be when I die. It’s funny when you get to be a certain age and you reflect on your life. You realize most of the time it didn’t turn out in the way you thought it would. We have two minutes left.