Rattle Magazine: The Neil Postman Award for Metaphor
Rattle is proud to announce Abby E. Murray's "Supermoon", which appeared in the Poets Respond series, is the winner of the 2024 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 regular 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 fifteen previous winners, please visit the award's webpage. To submit your own poems, choose any free submission option on our Submittable page.
SUPERMOON
by Abby E. MurrayIt doesn't arrive so much as continue
to exist, this blue supermoon
exactly who she was just days before.
When she's this bright though, I tell my daughter,
and this close, we give her another name, that's all.
I want to add that human kindness
is like this: never really changing,
never gone. This week, she asked me
if it was worth it, growing up in a cruel world—
that's the name she gave it, the name it earned. Cruel.
So we sat outside at night to wait
for something spectacular to prove itself.
We craned our necks like tourists in a cathedral,
expecting to see the tidy, timely face of God,
and all we got was a persuasion of clouds
so thick and cold we had to guess
where the moon might be glowing.
We had to point where the gloom was thinnest
and say there! as if it was only as extraordinary
as it was out of sight—for us, for now—
but it was happening, it was true,
for thousands of years in a row.
