2023 HeartWood Poetry Prize

Judged by 2022 Winner Hollie Dugas

Winner: Linda Dove

Glosa after the Flight Home, New York to California

Bijou—
The most glittering creature in any room.
We miss you every day.
We remember you every night.
There is thunder in our hearts.
—plaque found on a bench in Seward Park, NYC

Hummingbird hearts beat ten times
faster than ours, and their weight drops
against a neck of jewels. Tongues probe
for sugar into places they can’t see.
They back up, these birds, in mid-flight,
as if the past isn’t gone. When I walked
across Manhattan, I thought of you
in all the places I couldn’t see. I looked for
the star you painted—a kite that glows like
the most glittering creature in any room.

I don’t show you all the poems I write
you—not the love poems—which I save
for that day in the future when I am roasting
off onions for dinner and keeping my eye
on the cake, flying around your kitchen,
waiting for you to get home. It’s summer,
the windows are open, and the dogs and I
have been swimming. Our hair is damp.
We want you to hurry. We eye the door.
We miss you every day.

None of that exists yet, so it’s unclear
if we miss you then or now.
The future is a place we can’t see,
the feathered throat that turns matte black
then shifts to flame—sunlit, sparking.
We want to touch a fire this surprising.
Even when we’re not waiting for you,
we’re under your star. We flip it on
like a porch light. We wish on paint.
We remember you every night.

Like the birds, to have the heaviest heart
of any animal means we fly fast. We don’t
settle, so a branch becomes a lightning rod
not a roost. We live in the sky of each other,
which is also paint, which is also words.
What if we knew that someone somewhere
was making us a love poem—the unseen
fuel in the flower, scent just outside
the window, and cake coming, and years, and
there is thunder in our hearts.

Linda Dove

Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. She is also an award-winning poet, and her books include, In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017), Fearn (2019), and Switchfish (2023), as well as the scholarly collection of essays, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain (2000). Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives at the eastern edge of Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University.

1st runner-up: Johnny Cate

To The Girl Who Read Bukowski in My DUI Class

That dumb misdemeanor's off my record now.
Over a decade since I did 24 hours for driving drunk
and bunked with Ivan Denisovich—the one book
in the cell block book bin that wasn't total bullshit.
Some wise-guy guard's idea of a joke, I guess.
But that's all, beautiful blue lights included,
less memorable than you: the brooding fallen angel
in our court-mandated alcohol awareness class.
Booze school, said a soul-patched repeat offender,
slowly stirring cream into his coffee.
Arms crossed tight as dry ice, you radiated
righteous negativity, a vaporous CO2 cool
as your copy of Hot Water Music simmered on the table.
Zero-fucks-given in the flesh, you sat flashing
invisible switchblades, staring straight ahead
with Egyptian detachment, sphinx
in a studded leather belt. About the time they told us
anything over two drinks is technically a binge,
you reached for that book, exhaled and opened it.
Your aura exploded, high-lumen Klein blue
beside me as your eyes beamed onto the pages—
helicopter spotlights searching a perp, combing
darkness for a revelation that always fled the scene.

Johnny Cate

Johnny Cate is a poet, blues guitarist, vintage T-shirt collector and copywriter from Asheville, NC.

2nd Runner-Up: Susan Michele Coronel

Saying Yes to the Impossible Present

Standing on the precipice of now & you,
I’m not hesitating any longer. I’m going for it,

heart no longer handcuffed to tree, light
freed from lightning, song from songwriting.

I don’t know how long we’ll last or for how long
we’ll occupy this earth. Every beloved leaves—

it’s the law of biology—but why hesitate with
the knowledge of eventual leaving & instead

embrace the companion who does not draw
absence but takes its place, day inside the day

that frames the present & places the future
on a higher shelf. It’s like the metal handle

of a rusted lantern suddenly squeaking as you
tread the same worn path. But the heart’s changed.

It’s a burning fish, a wing of rain that swishes
past the body, the body, the body as dusk,

as flammable oil, as terrible earthquake,
as the inconceivable dissolution of all anyone

has ever known or will know. I say yes to
this impossible present, even when it clings

& disrupts, even when the hammer sinks deeper
into wet soil. The sun imprints its perfume

on water & your hands are beautiful, your hands,
veins unmistakable as chlorophyll bursting

or a horse doused in glitter, galloping
in the starlit downpour as the bend

of a lily’s throat leaks onto the sidewalk,
bursts with apples & oxygen,

with ghost pepper & milk that renews,
that haunts, that shivers in pools,

where it no longer hurts but emulates
music, the ripeness of peaches, plums

& loaves, salty hours in the sweet rim,
unwilling to impersonate any other day.