In Praise of Plastic Flowers

Because I come from a long line of bisexual nonbinary pacifists

married to cis gender hetero army officers, and because

the opening of this poem is a lie, but a sweet one:

a silk flower of a sentiment. I just want to say it somewhere:

I am not alone. I inherited what is good from people who tried

to do right but also did wrong, who enabled pain

while cultivating love where it wasn’t expected to grow.

My grandparents appreciated bowls of painted stone grapes

and apples because it showed them what plenty might look like

on their tables. Every day is an argument in favor of surprise.

I show my daughter how to twist a plastic plumeria blossom

the color of margarine into her dark hair

because real plumeria blooms far away from where we are

while the Dollar Tree near our house is bountiful with 10¢ knockoffs,

and I remember how little beauty has to do with exactness.

It is more concerned with what we hope about the contradictory world:

that it remains both soft and callused, rare and everywhere,

that it is what it has been and what it could be too.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest. www.abbyemurray.com

Dark Rooms

Editor's Choice: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

At eighteen I got up early and hitchhiked out of town. Hitchhiked all morning.

And when a man put his hand on my leg I took his picture. He didn’t look at me

again until I got out of his car.

I was braver then. The camera conferred an almost supernatural passport —

a kind of super power. Conjured a new origin story. For once I owned the sidewalk,

crossed barriers with ease that said “No Trespassing.” Photographed the guard in

the booth on his break with his coffee and a cigarette who didn’t tell me to leave.

Photographed the town drunk.

I had a darkroom once. Knew how to roll film around the canister in pitch black,

somehow managing not to fall backward into that bat cave. I knew how to develop

the image, agitating it, bringing it up through the glassy liquid in the tray. Its little

chemical placenta.

The first hint of an image, like a dream filling in: arms, legs, nose, the raccoon

killed by the side of the road. A young woman holding her toddler on a peeling

porch an early Maine morning, as old as the women Dorothea Lange photographed

in the migrant camps, becoming dust in the shacks they were shackled to.

Bodies coagulate on the sheet of paper like apparitions. Someone has come to tell

you what the dead want you to know. In the darkroom you make invisible things

visible. A magic trick, a kind of second rate resurrection. The camera around your

neck feels like the finger of God.

Joanna Young was the writer-in-residence at Millay House Rockland for the month of October 2025. Raised in Massachusetts, with generational roots in Vinalhaven, Maine, she now lives in Searsport. Walking with her dog Moxie on Moose Point nearly every day, she “feels initiated into a world of extraordinary beauty, mystery and healing. There is something about the horizon line that teaches me — creates a sense of reverence. In this space, this felt infinity, I feel myself open, begin to find words.”

Boundaries

Runner-Up: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

In the night crawl to the window where owls call, walls get in the way. An empty womb is still a womb. Children hope three-legged races have finish lines. Cameras catch the end of a horse race. Watching the pole vaulter or bending with the high jumper, we want to soar too. The records we could set if we could fly, but we rise and slam down: repetitively. Canadians raise an elbow to what used to be a peaceful border. The best books dissolve into a last page. Two kinds of people inherit the earth: rigorists and flexibles. Rigorists think words like gender and genre have firm edges. Flexibles embrace the bearded man who has a vagina. Rigorists dismiss radio banter about who sings country music to ignore crossovers. Free verse rubs up against jail bars and oozes through, cat on patrol. Prose poems snuggle in. Journaling lets loose a monkey that rushes to flick a light switch. Out the window, the moon begs – come play in limitless night.

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals as diverse as Kenyon Review and New Verse News and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. After 18 years of working with free verse, she is now writing prose poems. She serves as a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual. triciaknoll.com