Rattle Magazine: The Neil Postman Award for Metaphor
Rattle is proud to announce Amy Newman's "Abandoned Fair", which appeared in issue #86, is the winner of the 2025 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 19 past winners, please visit the award's webpage. To submit your own poems, choose any free submission option on our Submittable page.
ABANDONED FAIR
by Amy NewmanOur love is an abandoned fair:
the lights all broken on the midway,
some glitter still hung in the air.We strolled like kids. We weren't aware.
We satisfied ourselves all day.
Our love is an abandoned fair,though painted horses galloped there,
beneath—I cringe at the cliché—
some glitter, still hung the air,those sparkles of our wear and tear,
silver distractions. What did I say
our love is? An abandoned fair,an image of what mattered there—
gold, right? (See in a tossed bouquet,
some glitter still.) Hung in the airlike a promise? Nope. Nothing there.
Just sparkly garbage and decay.
Our love is an abandoned fair.
Some glitter still hung in the air.
