Rattle Poetry Prize
Deadline: July 15, 2025
The annual Rattle Poetry Prize celebrates its 20th year with a 1st prize of $15,000 for a single poem. Ten finalists will also receive $500 each and publication, and be eligible for the $5,000 Readers' Choice Award, to be selected by subscriber and entrant vote. All of these poems will be published in the winter issue of the magazine.
With the winners judged in an anonymized review by the editors to ensure a fair and consistent selection, an entry fee that is simply a one-year subscription to the magazine—and a large Readers' Choice Award to be chosen by the writers themselves—we've designed the Rattle Poetry Prize to be one of the most inspiring contests around.
Past winners have included a retired teacher, a lawyer, and several students. It's fair, it's friendly, and you win a print subscription to Rattle even if you don't win.
We accept entries online via Submittable. See Rattle's website for the complete guidelines and to read all of the past winners.
Please enjoy this finalist poem by Chad Frame, published in Rattle #86, Winter 2024:
Claw Machine
More to the left, he says, then leans to watch
the dangling claw from a better angle
as I guide the stubby joystick, grease-slickfrom unwashed hands—just two coin-fed alley kids
fishing for a way to pass the time. Behind the screen,
the glass-eyed, cheap stuffed animals, cotton-cored,plead with us for escape. We tune out the rumble-crash
of our parents' Tuesday night league, the shouted fucks
when they bowl poorly, and the shouted fuckswhen they bowl well, wafting Marlboro plumes braiding
midair with the steam from vending machine coffee,
generations of beer staining the ash-strewn carpeta thousand shades of brown. And his eyes, all blue
and lit up like pinball bulbs, are watching intently
as the claw drops for the rainbow bear, its clumsy seamsmisstitched and already unraveling.
This could be any night in midsummer
in middle-of-nowhere Americain the mid-nineties—except it's the one
when I decide to tell him how pretty
those eyes are, as I dangle the hard-wonbear by one misshapen foot, an offering
I am destined to find later in the men's room sink,
ripped into pieces, scattered like pins, fuck youfaggot Sharpied on its face. And this, I have learned, this
is how the heart operates—just when we think we've got
a grip on something, the claw seems rigged to let it go.
