Rattle Magazine: The Neil Postman Award for Metaphor
Rattle is proud to announce Nick Lantz's "Dolorimetry", which appeared in issue #88, is the winner of the 2026 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor.
This contest has a rolling deadline
We established the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor in honor and remembrance of Neil Postman, who died on October 5, 2003. The intention of the award is simple and two-fold: to reward a given writer for their use of metaphor, and to celebrate (and, hopefully, propagate) Postman's work and the typographical mind.
Each year, the editors choose one poem that was published from free submissions to Rattle during the previous year. There are no entry fees or submission guidelines involved. The author of the chosen poem receives $2,000.
For more information and to read all 20 past winners, please visit the award's webpage. To submit your own poems, choose any free submission option on our Submittable page.
DOLORIMETRY
by Nick LantzA woman married a skull. He had a beautiful
singing voice but had never cleaned a toilet
in his life. On her birthday, he bought a gold ring
for himself. You don’t even have fingers! she cried.
But at night he sang to her, and she always
forgave him. She quit her office job and earned
a living monetizing online videos of herself
sobbing uncontrollably while making crafts:
dioramas of her childhood vacations in Colorado,
an endless wool scarf the color of split pea soup.
Once, she wrote a poem in hot glue in the flesh
of her arm. She had many, many followers.
Her husband the skull had invented a machine
that measured how much pain a person
could tolerate. He named the machine
after his wife. What? he said, as she sobbed,
It’s a compliment. He sang while he ate dinner.
They never had children. A colony of bees
moved into the walls of their house. He refused
to call an exterminator—the house was her job—
but she liked to press her face to the thrum
of the wall. So instead, she cut a secret hole
where, at night, she could slip her hand into the hive
and let them sting her, just a little.
