Heartwood Poetry Prize

Judged by 2025 Winner Elizabeth Rae Bullmer

2026 WINNERS

First Place : Daniel Edward Moore

Dear Amygdala

Remember when we met in the womb’s pink school
before time carved our names in small wooden desks
and mothers wore lipstick and cried.

Remember sleep is when you heal and REM’s hot voice
comes every 90 minutes,
thawing the mind’s cold ground.

Remember waking is when you suffer,
like Lilacs in the morning imitating Christ,
his purple cape falling as he climbed Golgotha’s hill.

Remember I’m your beloved vase, holding the sun
in the water’s regret that it cannot save you after night falls
and memories become gray as the moon.

Remember if words could strip amyloid hands
from choking the nerves in your beautiful brain,
I’d build a library in the back of your skull

with shelves shaped like your loving lips
and be proclaimed guardian of every word,
armed to the teeth with the glory of speech.

Daniel Edward Moore

lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work has appeared in *Southern Humanities Review* and others. His work is forthcoming in *Action Spectacle Magazine, Common Ground Review, Emerge Journal,* and The Heartland Review. His book, *Waxing the Dents*, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Second Place Winner: J.M.R. HARRISON

If Life Hands You Lemons

For Debra Kang Dean

learn to juggle. Attune
to one yellow, dimpled fruit
tossed from hand to hand. Increase
the challenge: add more lemons.

Let them drop to the floor
until your fear of failure also falls away.
Do not discard the fruit when it grows
bruised and squishy; instead let it rest

in a shallow, glass bowl. Try
all this blindfolded. Can you sense
the air displaced by falling fruit?
Can you master the unseen?

Set out
your brush and watercolors.
Mix a morning shade of yellow
and the deep, aqueous blue of glass.

Strive for spirit over symbol.
Ignore complaints that your art
more closely resembles Rubber Duckies
Bobbing on Ocean Waves than

World-Weary Lemons in Cobalt Bowl.
Rejoice. You have released
still life into jubilant action.
Squeeze your lemons

and write letters, poems, and stories
with the juice. Send blank pages
to scattered friends, family,
and strangers. Wait

for an intuitive and patient someone
to pass paper over candle flame
until words emerge in browning juice.
Send them lemons.

J. M. R. Harrison

studied poetry at the independent Writers’ Center in Bethesda MD and is a 2016 graduate from the low residency MFA program of Spalding University's Naslund-Mann School of Graduate Writing in Louisville KY. Her poems have been published in, among others, *Tiferet Journal, Persephone Literary Magazine, and Soul Forte.* Her work has been included in eleven anthologies and was featured in *Fluent Magazine* and *The Good News Paper*.

Third Place Winner: Garrett Stack

Grackle Season

She let them inside
in late November
when the lonely air
tasted like TV
static and the robins
had picked the cemetery
clean of everything but stone.
There was nothing to it really
but a few bitter days
of open doors. First one
then five and finally
the whole plague arrived
fluttering in the eaves
of her living room. They roost
in her sweater drawer. Preen
in the kitchen sink
amidst the clattering saucers
and cutlery. Their high gloss
wings complement her taste
in wallpaper. Their songs
harmonize with snowfall.
In her dark bedroom, they stir
and settle, stir and settle,
a coterie of black on black
until dawn draws them
iridescent once more.
They’ve grown a taste
for burnt toast, for late night
cable murder mysteries
set in the south, for abandoned
strands of hair. The seldom
ringing phone makes them cry
and cry. Eventually,
when the evening fields
purple with clover
once more, they become
restive. First one then five
and finally the whole plague
tap anxiously against
the windows. She tells herself
the grackles aren’t ungrateful.
They just want
what we all want: a chance
to let the spring back in,
the choice to stay or leave.