Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest 2025
Congratulations to the winners of our 2025 humor poetry contest!
Honorable Mention $100
- Stephen Dotson Dale, The Ballad of Clyde the Dragon
- Sophie Develyn, Notes App Stand-up Routine, August
- Eddie Elizabeth, Ode to the Ichthyosaur Maternity Ward
- Madi Himelfarb, Ding
- Kim Keough, David in Cumberland
- Susan Kinsolving, At the Florist
- Molly Lanzarotta, The Poet Corrects the Official Documents
- Jon D. Lee, Perpetual Motion
- Phil Maund, Slush Brown
- Mandy Shunnarah, Mx. Potato Head at the Gender Swap Meet
- Lynn Tan, The Patty Wagon
- Carol Whitney Ward, My Sexy Compression Hose
Thanks to everyone who entered our 24th annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. The news in 2025 doesn't give us much to laugh about, except in a maniacal sort of horror-movie way. We're grateful for the comic relief that our 5,060 contestants provided.
First-round screener Lauren Singer shortlisted about 150 entries from which I selected our prizewinners and finalists. A number of you confessed an inability to feed or dress yourselves without comical mishaps, which makes it all the more impressive that you were able to press "submit" without setting your computer on fire (I hope). Some protested demeaning workplace conditions by imagining scenarios that would get you kicked out of a Wendy's. Others reworked the gender roles in fairy tales and literary classics.
Though this year's first-prize winner was immediately obvious, the remaining poems named here were in a very tight race. Why might I leave a poem at the finalist level? Sometimes, because we'd seen this genre of humor many times before; or some politically cringey lines or concepts found their way in; or when read aloud, it became evident that the poem went on a bit too long. Regardless, every one of the winners and finalists should be proud that their work stood out from such a crowded field.
Our Winners
First-prize winner Jeff Carter's "There Was an Old Woman" retells the plot of the nursery rhyme as an epic poem in the style of Paradise Lost, complete with footnotes citing imaginary scholarly sources to explain its supposed deep meanings. It's a popular technique among our entrants to wring humor from the incongruity between banal subject matter and flowery language, like a plastic toothpick embellished with diamonds. Carter's entry stood out because it sustained the elegant verse style smoothly throughout the long poem, capped off with a Dorothy-Parker-esque rejection of the whole gambit in the final couplet.
Julia Lichtblau's second-prize poem, "The Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 1939 (Revised)", is a curio cabinet of quirky and suggestive work specialties from a bygone era. The poem puts these colorful characters in conversation with one another, as if in a union hall, where the one thing they have in common is their resistance to being made obsolete by management.
Third-prize winner AJ Layague returns to the Wergle winners' circle with "The Three Muscatels Go to the Races", a follow-up to last year's Honorable Mention poem about three madcap, liquor-loving old ladies who are constantly plotting to break out of their nursing home for adventures. This time, they tangle with a mobster who's doping the ponies. Pray for him.
Honorable mentions found laughs in such topics as the bureaucratic nightmare of correcting foreign identity documents, a woman's progress from bridal garter to compression hose, gender-expansive children's toys, a twist on the dragon-princess-knight love triangle, and a titillating encounter in a convenience store bathroom. These poems stood out for having a strong central concept and following it through with focus and skill. We awarded two extra honorable mentions beyond the promised ten.
Our next contest is now open through April 1, 2026, with a top prize of $2,000. Unlike speech in America, the Wergle Flomp contest will always be free.
The judges would like to commend these finalists:
- Ben Daggers, "The Drawstring Got Stuck Inside My Favorite Hoodie and Now My Life is Ruined"
- Jacob Evelyn, "Infanzierno"
- Chad Frame, "Nude Man Nabbed by Police After 'Cannonball' Plunge into Giant Aquarium at Bass Pro Shop in Alabama"
- Elizabeth King, "signs that the world may be ending—or making pink lemonade"
- Ben Macpherson, "This Morning I Sneezed with a Mouthful of Bran Flakes"
- Dylan McNulty-Holmes, "The Search Engine Auto-Completes My Query to 'Do Horses Have Teeth'"
- Luisa Muradyan, "Everything Is Sexy"
- Carla Myers, "Instructions for Your Colonoscopy—Now with Pro Tips!"
- Laurie Rosenwald, "Joyful Christmakwanzukkah"
- Jim Shankman, "Friedrich Nietzsche Sings Gilbert and Sullivan"
- Robert Simpson, "Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, and Ronald McDonald"
- Chrissy Stegman, "Dressing Emily Dickinson in the Wind"
- Stephanie Stockmeister, "Mausoleum of Cheetos: The Autistic Child's Guide to Surviving Spontaneous Closet Volcano Birth"
- Debra Tillar, "Two Gents from Verona"
- Carson Wolfe, "Silicon Valley, in the Backseat of a Tesla"
Contest Judges
Jendi Reiter
Jendi Reiter is vice president of Winning Writers, editor of The Best Free Literary Contests, and oversees the Winning Writers literary contests. Jendi is the author of the novel Origin Story (Saddle Road Press, 2024), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the poetry collections Made Man (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2022), Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2015), and A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), and the award-winning poetry chapbooks Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) and Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). Awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists' Grant for Poetry, the 2016 New Letters Prize for Fiction, the 2016 Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction, the 2015 Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the 2013 Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize, the 2012 Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry from Descant magazine, the 2011 James Knudsen Editor's Prize in Fiction from Bayou Magazine, the 2011 OSA Enizagam Award for Fiction, the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize, and second prize in the 2010 Iowa Review Awards for Fiction. Jendi's work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, Passages North, Cutthroat, Best American Poetry 1990, and many other publications. See their interviews in RoundPier and Lammergeier.
Photo by Ezra Autumn Wilde
Contest Judges
Lauren Singer
Lauren Singer is an assistant judge of our Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest and North Street Book Prize, and a past judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She is a native New Yorker living in Western Massachusetts. Her poetry has been published in Nerve House, Bareback, Feel the Word, Read This, Kosmosis, One Night Stanzas, and other literary magazines across the country. An attendee of the New York State Summer Writer's Institute, she is a graduate of Bard College at Simon's Rock and received her MSW at the University of Chicago in 2015. She has self-published three chapbooks and received an honorable mention in the 2011 Wergle Flomp contest. In addition to her creative interests, Lauren works as a sex and relationship therapist and runs a private practice out of Northampton, MA. Her book-length poetry manuscript, Raised Ranch, will be published by Game Over Books in April of 2025. She prides herself on her wealth of useless pop culture knowledge, namely of nineties R&B lyrics, and she can pretty much quote "The X-Files".
