First Place
The Taste of Letters
By Gabby Kupfer
Gabby’s poem is featured in the April edition of The Hilltop.
Second Place
Rules For A Shared Existence
By Rachel Thorn
If you don’t feed the fairies –
Leave little tins of bread and soda pop
On the back porch for them –
They will put bedbugs in your sheets
To bite your toes.
Don’t forget, not one night,
For they have long memories
And wicked thoughts
And feel vindicated by your disrespect.
If you leave milk out for the fairies instead of soda,
They will laugh at you for being
Behind the times, and pinch your ears
Until they turn black and blue.
When the summer is stifling hot,
Leave a pink saucer with iced tea
Out next to the patch of daisies
And pray the fairies don’t sprinkle dandelion seeds
Over your front lawn
In exchange for golden wishes.
Third Place
The Gardener
By Eli Welter
My mind is searching for time and times,
Times without the knock of holding.
Wherever the light shines through the
kitchen and the stairway and the letter you wrote.
Above to where we waited,
where I wait and think
too much, all at once.
A breath in the garden, a heavy step
leaning toward where I sit.
Too much, overmuch.
Again in the sunlight and here rain,
leaves washed and sodden.
Hide the rain, hide the puddle.
There are no pages here.
Honorable Mention
To where may I turn for meaning in this life?
By Micah Sharp
To where may I turn for meaning in this life?
To ahead? To the future? What waits but pain and death?
To behind? To the past? What waits but memories and forever gones?
To the left? To liberalism? What waits but eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die?
To the right? To conservatism? What waits but save up, store up, horde up, for no on knows what tomorrow brings?
To the bottom? To what is below? What waits but the dark, insidious powers of hell and all its minions?
To the top? To what is above? What waits but the gods of myths and legends, destined to live and die like man?
To within? To what is inside? What waits but the depraved wretch, the cowardly cannibal?
To without? To what is outside? What waits but the ethereal nonexistence, the incognizant dark emptiness?
To where may I turn for meaning in life?
And then I hear a voice far off in the distant beyond, not above nor below, not left nor right, not before nor behind, not within and not without, yet beyond and so intimately close.
It says to me, “Not where, but Whom”.
From Whom may I find meaning in this life?
From Him Who was, Who is, Who will always be. Him Who is I AM.