2025 Nominees:

Click on the poem titles below to read these beautiful poems (and why we chose them):

• “Rejection Speech” by Flavian Mark Lupinetti, from The Pronunciation Part (The Poetry Box, February 2025)
• “Leaf Fall” by Carolyn Martin, from Splitting the World Open (The Poetry Box, March 2025)
• “What a performance is” by John L. Miller, from Andes (The Poetry Box, May 2025)
• “Loowitlatkla” by Christine Colasurdo from There Is Always a Volcano Before You: Poems for Mount St. Helens and the Cascade Range (The Poetry Box, November 2025)
• “Sacred Ground” by Kristin Roedell from Lessons in Buoyancy (The Poetry Box, December 2025)
• “In the Assisted Living Home” by Debbie Hall from Mixtape: Marginal States (The Poetry Box, December 2025)

We wish all of these talented poets the best of luck!

The post Pushcart Nominees for 2025 <br>(and links to poems) appeared first on The Poetry Box.

This poem pulls you in with a title that immediately takes an unexpected turn, a clear signal to get ready for an emotional and masterful poem that doesn’t let go…not even when you’re finished reading it. Every time I read it, I’m left speechless.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

Rejection Speech

by Flavian Mark Lupinetti

that you can’t trust a teenager
is a lesson I learned the hard way
because I trusted Tommy who was
thirteen when I met him but with
the physique of a four-year-old
thanks to a heart the size of a
half deflated beachball and just as robust
when it came to pumping blood and
although some of my colleagues said
he was too sick for me to do anything
I transplanted his heart and
by the following spring he played
Little League—not well; it turns out
that hitting a curve ball can’t
be transplanted—and over the
following years he took his antirejection
drugs and made his appointments
and developed a side hustle talking
to civic groups to raise money
for the hospital until five years later
when he decided taking meds
sucked so he quit taking them
(rejection, obituary) and if Tommy
was the only teenager who did this
that would be tragic enough but Charlene
age fourteen did the same thing because
the drugs grew hair on her forehead
and her back—talking Lon Chaney
wolfman pelt here—and Derek at sixteen
moved out of his mom’s house
to live in the trunk of a friend’s car
before giving up and that shit happens
over and over and over so don’t say a
fucking word to me when I transplant
kids who are mentally challenged
because one thing I can count on is
they’re supervised so closely they never
miss a dose and the other thing I can
count on is I never have to ask myself
should I have put that heart into somebody else

from The Pronunciation Part by Flavian Mark Lupinetti (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “Rejection Speech” <br>by Flavian Mark Lupinetti appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Every year, Robert and I each have a love/hate relationship with leaves littering our lawn and walkway. This poem not only reframes the splendor of their magnificent color and our relationship with our neighbors, but turns this deciduous routine into gratitude for life’s slow doling out of both triumph and tragedy alike.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

Leaf Fall

by Carolyn Martin

Late autumn and the game rages on.
Six weeks of blowing/raking/recycling
in between foggy frost and rain.
Neighbors tease about whose belong to whom—
cherry/maple/myrtle/star magnolia—
and groan at Nature’s outside joke:
as soon as lawns are clear, leaf-devils swirl
dervishly around our cul-de-sac.
We call timeout and plan to reconvene
tomorrow if the sun breaks free.
Which makes me wonder: what if
leaves fell in unison? We could pick
a Saturday before football games kick off,
and gear up to tackle one morning’s work
to shut the season down. We’d bench
memories of grudges and gripes and cheer
each other on with splashes of camaraderie.
But … a second thought: Nature may be wise
with her leaf-by-leaf strategy.
What if grief came all at once?
Or failure, love, success, crinkled skin?
What if, in one determined day,
we faced decades of experience?
It’s the doling out that makes life bearable.
This afternoon, after I store my rake and gloves,
I intend to chat with my star magnolia tree.
Branches of pussy willows are blooming
beneath her dome of half-green leaves.
I’ll thank her for nudging me off the couch
when her yellows sprinted down the street
and ask if she can estimate
when the thousands holding on will fall.
I want to strategize how to say good-bye
before we lock our doors, turn our lights
inside out, and hibernate until
buds argue their way into early spring.

from Splitting Open the World by Carolyn Martin (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “Leaf Fall” <br>by Carolyn Martin appeared first on The Poetry Box.

I love how this poem is an Ars Poetica in the setting of a poetry reading, but with the listener in mind. It fills me with a sense of community and honors the unspoken communication and connection between speaker and listener. And then that killer last line—so unexpected, yet reassuring—giving this poem unlimited layers of meaning.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

What a performance is

by John L. Miller

is to make you listen, who happens to listen,
to make you pause, stop what you do,
even carrying what you carry, you decide
for a little longer you can bear it,
but you come to the doorway,
listen when it’s said in the pause,
the moment of the room, you
attuned to the speaker, the song,
nothing else happens, yet you
change, you are given intention,
given invitation, you sit beside yourself,
place at your feet what brought you,
what you thought you carried
was not what weighed you,
you pass from your hand
to your hand the gift brought to you,
it is smaller than you believed,
a shiver, a heartbeat, an eye blink, you become
wholly anew in the longest minute
of the Calvary of risking, the listening
when it ends is now your day
surging forward. Know you
are never accidental.

from Andes by John L. Miller (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “What a performance is” <br>by John L. Miller appeared first on The Poetry Box.

I love how this poem keeps expanding into new metaphor with each rich description of the volcano. Each time I read it, I gain a new appreciation for Mt Saint Helens and that ominous eruption in 1980.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

Loowitlatkla

by Christine Colasurdo

Everybody knows mountains can’t read,
capped by lenticular clouds, licked by rivers.
But I send my words to the mountain anyway—
words like salmon eggs heaped at creek bottom,
words like ravens released from a long night’s breathing,
words like the tiny pink trumpets of twinflowers
tooting their perfume to the ants and bees.

Lawetlat’la. Sounds like water.
Sounds like the echoes of tongues long accustomed
to ocean, rain, dew, marsh, lake, stream.
Droplets fall from fir boughs smacking my forehead.
Lawetlat’la: Cascade Mountain.

I was born with a dream of the volcano,
old hump of earth peeping through hospital windows
to where I beached, slippery and screaming.
Mountains don’t peep any more
than they can read, though I woke to milk
and milkshake rivers trickling under glaciers
whose sweat described the heat of the sun.

Loowitlatkla: is that the old woman wheezing
over smoldering coals at Tamanawas Bridge
or the dimple-faced virgin in love with her own skin?
Is she heavy as old andesite or light as new snow?
Kind as a grandmother or vain as a teenager?

Or perhaps the volcano is both and neither—
old as a precocious girl, young as a grinning octogenarian,
admitting nothing, the way mountains do.
The stories never say if she had children.
They never speak of her in middle age,
only that she tended fire and fostered fire
and doomed and saved her nation.

Years ago the mountain was my grandmother,
gave me huckleberries to eat when I was seven,
chewy thimbleberries whose leaves I used as hankies,
beady salmonberries gold and plump as summer.
Berries are the mountain’s tart blood:
snowberries, soapberries, dewberries, bunchberries,
elderberries red and blue, blackcaps and salal,
and the petite poisonous blue berry
of the queen’s-cup bead lily,
petals white as a winter crevasse.

With berries she gave me black bears
snorting and heaving, slinking past the family
tent to upturn metal cans and rustle up watermelon rinds,
barbecued-chicken bones, stiff right angles of bread crusts
soaked in stale mayonnaise and mustard.

But maybe the mountain is a young woman after all,
a young woman in love with stars on lake water,
clutches of wildflowers, meditations, guitars
whose music drifts over night’s black waters,
like those underground rivers at the volcano’s heart,
those runnels of superheated ground water flashing
to steam in an instant so half the face cascades
like a broad and deafening waterfall,
like rough bark from a rotting snag
like dreams from an adolescent
who must shrug off childhood
for a paved and dutiful world.

Lawetlat‘la. Smoking Mountain.
Sounds like harmonic tremor, fizzing of magma,
rhythms long played beyond understanding,
an unseen rising for fools’ disbelief.

The summer before the eruption
I felt the volcano shudder—rattling cabinets,
shaking worn floors of a timbered lodge.
I didn’t know it was the future
crouching like a cougar.

Lawetlat’la: Sounds like the past going under—
a burning of osprey, voles, chipmunks, martens,
a suffocation of spiders, steelhead, bobcats, ptarmigans,
a drowning of otters, beaver, salamanders, mink,
a ripping of cedars, cottonwoods, hemlocks, alders,
a blocking of rivers, storm of lightning, plume of darkness,
landscape of fire, a crushing of all places
under rock, ice, wood, water, corpses, mud.

Loowitlatkla. Destroyer and destroyed,
she who covers by uncovering,
reveals by concealing, closes by disclosing.

Can we know the difference
between a word not yet said and silence—
those moments of calm between
cudgels of thunder on backcountry days?
Smooth water pools silently above a large fall.
Some mountains sputter and die.
One day that soft hot belly will harden—
like drowned logs slowly petrifying
in a lake smashed and dammed.

Compared to the volcano my own
life is less than a spatter of stones
skittering down that old Dogs Head dome
to break an afternoon’s long silence,
a grain of pulverized dacite
lost among landslides.

Lawetlat’la: Sounds like all things—
dying and rising, sweetness and violence,
a slow accretion of Earth’s molten meanings.
I want to know how the volcano carves
a pond out of its profile to collect rainwater,
how it fashions a furnace in the grip of a glacier,
how it catches clouds on summer mornings
and loses them to wind and crater dust.

For it seems that mountain is everywhere—
lies buried in cells, flies like a god to distant places,
bubbles up like spring water deep beneath willows,
sings in cracks no human can hear.
Nothing escapes the volcano—
it senses the long ropes of cedar roots sinking,
sneaking like snakes through pumice;
it hears fir needles breathe, their stomata
sighing like little accordions in the subalpine air;
it knows how long each tree will live.
I breathe because it lets me.

Lawetlat‘la. Sounds like something
crashing through brush, like deer sniffing
for shrubs beyond the sedges, like a ladder
of arrows shot up to the moon,
the trickle of an old cycle starting anew.

Tadpoles burst the seams of blast-zone lakes,
cutthroat fingerlings dart downstream,
chickarees screech and whip their tails,
elk lumber past ponds where newts have mated,
marmots creep along blasted logs whose tips
swing off ledges high in the air, even the trillium
blooms and dies as though nothing has happened,
as though nothing might ever happen again.

The past is a pocketful of pumice
I have tried to piece together.
Everybody knows mountains can’t talk
but now the volcano flaps her fireweed quilts
and whispers how the bats love her evening light.
These words might burn before I hike
past timberline in morning.

—-Note—-
*Loowitlatkla: A 19th century Indian-white term for Mount St. Helens. Versions include Loo-wit Lat-kla, Tah-one-lat-clah and Lawetlat’la. The word Loowitlatkla first appeared in print in 1860.

from There Is Always a Volcano Before You by Christine Colasurdo (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “Loowitlatkla” <br>by Christine Colasurdo appeared first on The Poetry Box.

I couldn’t help but smile every time I read this poem. What a glorious celebration of life; our bodies—in all its beautiful forms; and to never taking ourselves so seriously we forget to let our mouth curve into a faint smile. If I live to be 98 years old, I will wear purple gloves and go for a naked stroll.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

In the Assisted Living Home

by Debbie Hall

William stands naked
in the foyer, gripping his walker,
fingers shielded from sticky germs
by bright purple surgical gloves.

Sipping her scotch and water
in the living room,
my mother raises one eyebrow
and her mouth curves
into a faint smile
as she watches him.

It’s too damn hot in here!
William barks.

Perhaps he is counting on shock value
to deflect attention
from the 30 rolls of toilet tissue,
12-pack of paper towels
and 100-count box of rubber gloves
he has pilfered and stashed
beneath his bed.

And yet, this laying in of supplies
may indicate
nothing more than
William’s strong belief
in his potential for a long life.
Who would not call that
a healthy outlook at 98?

Who would deny him
the privilege of walking naked
down the hallway,
skin glistening,
every motion of his body
a triumphant song?

from Mixtape: Marginal States by Debbie Hall (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “In the Assisted Living Home” <br>by Debbie Hall appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Mental health is an issue that many people believe can be easily solved with a pill, not realizing the impact nor the pseudo-anesthetic state that can accompany such a protocol, especially long term. Kristin’s poem not only addresses this complex love/hate relationship with “meds,” but honors the inner wildness that doesn’t always want to be tamed, and does so in beautiful language.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

Sacred Ground

by Kristin Roedell

Both disease and meds
will rob you of yourself
my psychiatrist said,
glasses suspended
from a necklace
brash as a trapper’s
trading beads.

I am strung by the neck
by every dose; I cannot
trade with anyone—

but I take the effacing pills.
I remember I chose
this compromised wellness;

It’s too late to choose anew.
To my lover, I say:
there must be a wilderness
at the edge of memory
and mind—
It will have its raw
untilled splendor.

If I grow silent,
believe I still thrive:
I’m blooming like cacti
in crimson petals,
I’m dreaming of oceans
asleep in the dunes.

Remember
I am remembering you
In every moment.

Then, let me be unwise,
and forget my pills,
I want to wander
the dark among Joshua trees.

I want to sleep with
the sand bats
that wake to hunt mayflies,
I want to nest with a peregrine
on a cliff’s edge.

Be kind
and let me go mad
beneath the devouring
moon.

from Lessons in Buoyancy by Kristin Roedell (The Poetry Box, 2025)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “Sacred Ground” <br>by Kristin Roedell appeared first on The Poetry Box.

2024 Nominees:

Click on the poem titles below to read these beautiful poems:

• “Miscarriage Three” by Cathy Cain, published in The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry & Art (#14), October 2024, The Poetry Box.
• “Hungry Ghost” by Willa Schneberg, published in The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry & Art (#14), October 2024, The Poetry Box.
• “Sail On” by Linda Ferguson, published in The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry & Art (#14), October 2024, The Poetry Box.
• “Beauty Sleeping” by Kim Peter Kovac, published in A Bit Left of Straight Ahead, June 2024, The Poetry Box.
• “Rodrigo Fails to Meet the Learning Objective” by Ginny Lowe Connors, published in White Sail at Midnight, November 2024, The Poetry Box.
• “We Do This, We Do That” by Shawn Pittard, published in Witness, December 2024, The Poetry Box.

We wish all of these talented poets the best of luck!

The post Pushcart Nominees for 2024 <br>(and links to poems) appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

We Do This, We Do That

by Shawn Pittard

~inspired by Frank O’Hara

It took a while but we’re comfortable now
with my helping her with her shower.

We’re past the self-conscious joking.
We focus on the pleasures

of hot water, shampoo, and a bath sponge.
We take the time to scramble eggs

with parmesan, salt, and pepper.
Spend the rest of the morning cleaning up the kitchen.

Some days we go out to the wildlife area
with our binoculars and a couple of drive-through sodas

listening to rock-and-roll—
Mark Knopfler is a favorite but Elvis is the King.

During late afternoons, we tally up
the living and the dead:

a younger brother living and retired to the Philippines,
two of her big sister’s three sons still alive;

among the dead her parents,
her husband of 62 years.

She says,
I’m your mother?

Yes, I’m your son.
But you’re so old.

from Witness by Shawn Pittard (The Poetry Box, 2024)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “We Do This, We Do That” <br>by Shawn Pittard appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

Rodrigo Fails to Meet the Learning Objective

by Ginny Lowe Connors

Numbers wheel across the whiteboard,
swerve of swallows arcing suddenly over the bridge

into the evening sky. He remembers that sky
from last night, settling over the city
in its startling hues of indigo and gold.

Without even trying, he memorized the birds,
their geometry of appear and disappear,
feathered unison in the fading light.

But right now Rodrigo doesn’t have the answer—
the integer, the positive number, the solution,
the refrain. All he has is the feeling

that chairs have nothing to do with living (yet here he sits),
that figures are meant to be moving
and that dance, although it’s not for boys,

not for boys like him, would be a better way to answer.
He knows this in all the muscles of his body,
in all the colors of his mind … but how to say it?

Rodrigo squirms in his seat, concentrates
on a wasp knocking itself against the window.
The light’s become a slippery plane, hard, indecipherable

but still the wasp keeps climbing and buzzing, feeling
its way along, looking for a way out.

from White Sail at Midnight by Ginny Lowe Connors (The Poetry Box, 2024)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The post “Rodrigo Fails to Meet the Learning Objective” <br>by Ginny Lowe Connors appeared first on The Poetry Box.