Thank you to all those who submitted to our Being in Bodies competition.
The judge, John L. Stanizzi, has made the following selections:
First prize: ‘To Keep Our Mouths So Sweetly Fed’ by Lynn Thayer
Second prize: ‘Purple Plums’ by Katherine Szpekman
Third prize: ‘My mother apologizes for getting goop in my hair’ by Haley Bosse
The following poems have also been highly commended and will be published alongside the prizewinners in a special issue of The Passionfruit Review in late March:
After Treatment – Maya Bernstein
Rewild – Laura Kearney
Overcast – Jhoanna Parvati
For M – Bethany Hart
Ode to my body, after a run – Olga Dermott-Bond
Visiting Day – Maya Bernstein
Meditation on my left hand – Jacqui Ritchie
Waiting Tables, 1985 – Cindy Milwe
In summer I want to be a woman – Mike Chrisman
‘To Keep Our Mouths So Sweetly Fed’ by Lynn Thayer
It’s dusk before I risk words,
their pinked softness, rosy
aromas, and though night brings
velvet, more flowers under anemic sky,
my verbs flatten to moony grayscale, color
washed from my lips like a river’s wet heap.
I pace to make my body mean something.
Press flushed skin against anything
cool, try to layer reserve
over newly threshed injury.
I know I risk more than words with you.
More than saying the thing I mean.
But I won’t be stolen away
by my body’s restless questioning,
the way she mounts a statement
with fervor, then curls her mouth
at the edges of it. Here, across our shared
pastoral, her dark meadow hints at safety,
yet treeline glints with so many eyes, lit
like paired forges, like felled stars,
by which to fabricate an answer.
Night makes you believe I’m past the hurt.
Night makes animals of us both.
After, a slant hymn unfurls,
foxglove and oleander
at the tip of my tongue
‘Purple Plums’ by Katherine Szpekman
For days, we fought,
while the purple plums waited
in the refrigerator, in a green bowl
next to the expired milk.
I feared the cold
burgundy flesh
had turned to mush,
that things had spoiled.
But I wanted to make the torte.
So, I sliced the fruit from the sharp pits,
creamed sugar, butter, and eggs,
sifted flour, baking powder, and salt,
and beat well.
I spooned the batter into the springform pan,
arranged the fruit skin-side up, sprinkled
sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon,
and added a touch
of cardamom and ginger.
September’s evening sky grew fuzzy.
Bats circled the yard.
We cut warm wedges of torte.
The bruised spots, the soft fruit,
like you, they survived my negligence.
‘My mother apologises for getting goop in my hair’ by Haley Bosse
It’s Mother’s Day and we are making candles
Silicone molds laid out before us
And my aunt’s long lost metal bowl
Double boiling on the stove.
The goop is a gel meant to keep her skin
From over-drying. If it does,
It peels too soon, pulls too deep
And brings the blood
Through the surface and into the air.
She didn’t expect to be candling today
Nor did I, our plan to watch some movie
On Netflix in the dark,
Her skin slowly sloughing off the burn.
It’s Mother’s Day, but two days ago
She went to melt her face off,
To keep the cancer from becoming something bad.
The doctors told her to lay down at least a week
But here she is, bright red and bustling
Between plastic packs of petals
And placemats lined with lotus seeds.
She tells me not to shake
As I hold the mold between my palms
And let her pour the body in,
Still just wax but becoming skin
And bones, a torso twisting tightly,
Hiding all its flowers,
Just waiting to be burned.
About the judge
John L. Stanizzi is the author of fourteen books: Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time, High Tide-Ebb Tide, Chants, Four Bits, Sundowning, The Tree that Lights the Way Home, POND, Feathers and Bones, Viper Brain and SEE. His new book, Entra La Notte (In English, the title means Night Comes) will be released sometime in January 2026.
John has published widely. Besides Passionfruit, his poems can be found in 200-plus publications, including Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Tar River, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Poetlore, and many others.
His nonfiction can be found in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Potato Soup Review,After the Pause, Adelaide, Metaworker, and many others. In 2021 he received a Creative Writing-Non-Fiction Fellowship from Connecticut’s Commission on the Arts, Culture, and Diversity, and also in 2021, Potato Soup named his storyPants best of 2021, and included it in their anthology of several years of outstanding short non-fiction. John has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net and is currently in the running for the position of Poet Laureate, for the state of Connecticut. The announcement of the new Poet Laureate will happen just after the new year. He was last year’s first place winner in The Ekphrastic Review’s Ekphrastic Marathon.
John is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar. He is also a retired English Professor at Manchester Community college in Connecticut. John was appointed The New England Poet of the Year in 1998. His memoir, Bless Me Father for I have Sinned ready for publication. John has just completed judging New England’s “New England Poet of the Year” contest. He has worked as a Teaching Artist with “Poetry Out Loud,” the Poetry Foundation’s national recitation contest. John also curated the Connecticut “Fresh Voices Competition,” a contest for high school students all over Connecticut. For many years, John has also been in charge of The College/University Poet of the year. Recently, he judged a contest for adult poets called Soundwaves in Lincolnshire, England, and another contest in Belfast, Ireland.
John lives in Coventry, Connecticut with his wife, Carol, and their three kitties.
You can read his poetry in Issue 3 of The Passionfruit Review or check out his website here. https://www.johnlstanizzi.com.