Fish Publishing Poetry Prize
Deadline: March 31, 2024
Writers from all nations eligible
Top ten poems will be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2024
- 1st prize: €1,000 ($1,000)
- 2nd prize: Fish Writing Course + €300 ($300)
- 3rd prize: €300 ($300)
Judge: Billy Collins
Submit unpublished poems up to 60 lines
Results: May 15, 2024
Anthology Published: July 2024
Entry Fees: €14 ($14) for first entry, €9 ($9) each additional
See the complete rules and submit.
Please enjoy Winifred Hughes' winning entry from last year...
The Scene Without
"The scene" is still the same—that's what you called it,
the view from our back windows that opens in winter
like a spread scroll—the brook that runs free and full, skidding
among stones, browned meadows with their broken stems
and grasses, matted leafmold, woods stripped of cover
spilling pent up secrets, light pallid, whether bleak or tender
only you could have told. You'd still know it instantly—how you
loved the scope of it, the sheer expanse; loved even the battered,
colorless stalks, the twiggy bushes, hollow seedpods—remnants
of your care only last summer, no longer ago than that, now
unbridgeable by any quickening of spring, unimaginable by any
thought of mine. Only this morning I saw a sharp-shinned hawk
gliding overhead, ready to plunge. Before that a fox, uttering
its short, sharp yap, then loping across the yard to re-enact
the primal plot that ends in survival and abrupt extinction.
Small songbirds enact it too, gorging against the cold but not
to the point of slowing their flight from the hawk. Look there—
I want to show you the brown creeper camouflaged against
the mottled bark, until it spirals down to the base of the trunk;
the golden-crowned kinglet flitting skittishly among the bare
branches, picking at lichens; the flicker, with its yellow-shafted wings
and dagger-like bill, drilling for grubs in the half-thawed ground.
I wonder if they might be the same individual birds you saw this time
last year, looking out from these same windows on this winter scene.
I want to tell you that they are all still here, that I am still here, that nothing
has changed—just everything inside the windows, but nothing without.
Winifred Hughes is a reformed academic and active birder living in Princeton, New Jersey. The author of two chapbooks, as well as poems in scattered journals, she currently serves on the boards of two local environmental organizations and teaches courses in nature writing and ecopoetry. When she is not actually writing poems, she can be found leading bird walks and poking around in the local wetlands, or hanging out with her two grown sons.
