Via Negativa

Runner-Up: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

A narcissus bulb half-buried

half-bared to the sun

gnawed by animals

flowered into the earth

like a brain into a skull

clumped and cramped

the crowd of waxy petals

pushed out walls

made a chamber

of the dark

*

Another day another baby

born beneath the besieged

city of Kyiv

(you will grow underground

is what you will do)

*

God is a dark night

said St. John of the Cross,

praising the black cloth

of midnight that saved him

*

the plant flourishing

against its constraints

is a kind of making-do

(what’s the point of what if

or if only)

*

You must imagine

how it appeared from above—

picture a small urban garden plot

winter-swept, with a leafless peach tree

and stranded foundation rock

a ripple of snowdrops

crocus then a wave of phlox

frilly daffodils purple hyacinth

the whole bed blooming

and, off to the side, all alone

the sunburnt top

of a rust-brown bulb

scraped by squirrel teeth

I toss a handful of dirt over it

and days later, a fist of green

appears beside the bulb

*

At a garden party

a well-known poet said to me

I don’t know what I

would have done

if my son had wanted

to be a poet...

give it up, I guess,

and not write poetry

Could you?

Could you really give up writing?

I wanted to know

*

If a man wishes

to be sure of the road

he’s traveling on,

then he must close his eyes

and travel in the dark

*

My friend met a man

online, they played

scrabble, talked across time

zones, continents— nights

and nights of revelation

This is Love, she said

then he confessed

he’s a scammer, looking

for money, my friend

locked down assets

Now she sends

money for textbooks,

helps pay his tuition

he’s become a beloved

son, she’s yet

to touch his hand

*

O heart in the darkness, how much

you want, how little you need

*

When I ask my grown sons if they want

their childhood toys, they answer

We don’t need them

I say want

is different from need

The flower needs water and light

the flower wants nothing

Myself, I am full of want,

a living body of need

*

St. John was kidnapped and dragged off to the Priory...

There he was shut in a gloomy, ill-smelling little closet; half starved;

permitted no change of his flea-ridden clothing for eight months,

and beaten...with such zeal that his shoulders were crippled for life

*

I waited for the sunken ribbons of green

to find their way up, to reach toward the sun,

a vertical leap I depend on

Surely it was a matter

of time, the sky irresistible

for the growing thing—

all my life, roots have traveled down,

flowers unraveled by light—

but the days and the nights

were seemingly one for what was caged

inside the earth

*

With ropes twisted from strips of blanket and tunic,

St. John let himself down from a dizzy height into the darkness

*

Buried flower,

you forged passages

through your fuse

the small

knuckle of leaf

bared to the sun—

sufficient

*

I know a man

who loved his wife

And when she died

he loved her even more

Each day he talks with her

says he knows her better now

than when she was alive

*

Faith is a dark night for man,

but in this very way it gives him light

*

I watch on Zoom

(lit-up screen

propped on my lap)

as poets under

siege in Ukraine

read love poems

*

Google says

subterranean

flowers can thrive

underground

swapping water

and nutrients with

what lives above

*

Finally, I take a trowel

and make a trench to release

the green wad of leaves

and that’s when I find

the underground bouquet—

pale sickly bundle—

in a shallow grave

Quickened, the bulb

rooted, leaved, and flowered

etching the walls of its cave

*

St. John was taken in

“looking like an image of death,”

and given pears stewed with cinnamon...

the very day of his escape,

he dictated some verses

he had composed in prison

*

what is the word for what emerges

unintentional  inevitable

undeniable

(how the durable flowers

cupped the dirt

that held them)

*

Only his final illness saved him

from further persecution...

his voice rising from the rotted flesh

in delight at the beauties

of the Song of Songs

*

I transplanted the bulb

roots down, into

a proper pocket

of rich wet dirt

and spread its leaves and flowers

like a mantle on earth’s surface

where they lay

spineless and blanched

separated from their night

expiring hour by hour

beneath the strange sun

*

NOTES: Unless indicated otherwise, the quotes are from St. John of the Cross; most can be found in The Poems of St. John of the Cross, (Revised English versions by John Frederick Nims, 1968), which is also the source of the biographic passages about St. John.

Mary Buchinger’s most recent books are Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, Honors, 2024 Massachusetts Book Award), The Book of Shores (2024), and Virology (2022) both from Lily Poetry Review Books, and she is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Plume, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. www.MaryBuchinger.com

Photograph of My Father, Age Seven

Winner: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

A brown-haired boy holds

a stuffed Saint Bernard & waves at me.

His chubby arms are freckled,

flecked with blonde hairs

like a little golden bear.

The bow of his lips blushed

& cracked from perpetual licking.

I wonder if he is afraid

of never waking up,

like me,

or locks the door

at the burst of a beer can

against the living room wall.

Behind his pintsized body, sunlight leaks out

through the trees in reddish pink.

He braces his legs to run at the camera,

to leap.

I could catch him, I think.

I could hold him.

Olivia Jacobson is an MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University. She is the editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her chapbook, On Junkyards, won the Etchings Press Book Prize for Poetry (forthcoming). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Moon City Review, Shō Poetry Journal, Outskirts Literary, Watershed Review, Rust & Moth, Cottonmouth Journal, Club Plum, SUNHOUSE Literary, The Shore, The Eckerd Review, and Rougarou.

Note from the Prose Poetry Editor: Jefferson Navicky, Spring 2026

I’ve been thinking about boxes this winter. As I type this in early January, I’m realizing the holiday season could also be called the cardboard box season. Each trip to the dump requires breaking down a variety of different-sized cardboard boxes to flatten and shove into the back of my car. Like boxes, prose poems come in many different sizes, some of them quite boxy and others not at all. In its block form, there’s something geometric about the prose poem and the pleasures the form provides. Like the words were poured into a mold and they perfectly filled that container to the brim. The block form is a concrete poem as sturdy and as measured as a square or a rectangle, in appearance quite staid, and certainly nothing as flashy as a trapezoid or octagon or tetrahedron. And so the prose poem is graceless. Think of how gracefully a lineated poem can inhabit a page as if painted upon it in, for example, elegant couplets. Instead of a signature, the prose poem is a stamp; instead of a snake that slithers down the page, it is a lego-block pig. It cries stability and regularity. The prose poem announces, this is a paragraph and this is dull. It’s exactly this external characteristic, this geometric certainty, that lends itself so well to subversion. Poets use a prose poem’s mundane appearance to spring upon a reader an escape hatch from stasis. Once a reader emerges through this hatch, the poem explodes into impossibility and surprise. The prose poem: your dull uncle in the grey sweater who tells you secret stories of what fantastic beasts emerge from the gateway of the bathtub faucet.

Some of the prose poems in this Winter 2026 issue are minimalist – Robert McDonald’s “First Date” catches the initial vertiginous moments of a romance while “Tout Nu” by Jonathan Memmert gives us a wild typographical exploration of dreaming. Merridawn Duckler’s “Directions to my House” provides exactly what its title offers, yet something strange catches a reader’s attention with its  “wall of evergreens roughly the length of my ancestors.” “Pretty Handsome” by t love smith examines gender and the military, and the pressures to “become more becoming.” And finally, Joseph Cooper’s “The Elephant Seal” is a exuberant ride inside the identity of a town.

Cooper has been writing prose poems for many years (we both attended Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in the early 2000’s), and I always enjoy finding out what he’s been up to. Since he’s such a devoted and long-time practitioner of the prose poem, I wanted to ask him a few questions. He also just came out with a new book of prose poems, The Thief of Mars (Carbonation Press 2025).

JN: How did you first begin writing prose poems, and what do you think there is about the form that keeps you coming back to them?

JC: I’ve been writing prose poems for nearly twenty years now, but only recently defined them as such. I started writing what I referred to as prose blocks at Naropa that were inspired by my childhood speech block—a form of impediment—which later manifested in my first book, Autobiography of a Stutterer. However, for whatever reason, I never defined them as prose poems even though, in retrospect, they clearly were. Over the years, I have intentionally practiced the form as it provides me with great comfort and sensibility amidst the contextual absurdity I’m so very fond of. I love the warmth of a paragraph so much that I think if I tried to break a line at this point, it would feel artificial and insincere. 

JN: Do you think there's something about the prose poem that lends itself to the absurdity you employ so successfully? If so, what do you think it is, and have you always been connected to this absurdity?

JC: I think that the prose poem, for me, especially as I employ it in its block form, resembling a Polaroid or a postcard, provides the limited framework for the snapshot moment in time that I’m seeking in these poems. Whenever I’m writing one, I attempt to turn normality upside down, getting in and out of the poem as quickly as the poem allows to avoid any unnecessary language, and to lead a reader from a commonplace situation into a preposterous one. There’s a stability in the prose poem that gives me the sensation that I can say and do things that I’m otherwise incapable of exploring in the real world. I’m really attracted to that physical limitation, and I think it lends itself quite effortlessly to absurdity, the malleability of impending disorder, something like looking at a slide under a microscope. Absurdity has long been attractive to me, first with the surrealist painters, then cinematically with The Twilight Zone, the works of David Lynch, and in later years with the poetry of James Tate, Russell Edson, and Greg Boyd. It provides me with great amusement in a routine world that is otherwise delightfully ordinary. 

JN: I'm glad you mentioned Tate, Edson, and Boyd, because I noticed they all have poems dedicated to them in The Thief of Mars. As do fellow Naropa poets Andrew Peterson and Jared Hayes, but so too Stephen King and Charles Simic, and then a bunch of people I recognize or don't recognize at all. I wonder how you think about these dedications. Are the dedicated pieces in conversation with the writers? Are they gifts? Do you add the dedication at the end, or is that front of mind when you start writing? 

JC: The dedicated poems are less conversational, as they are tokens of gratitude. “The Contortionist’s Daughter,” for example, came from numerous conversations with a dear friend of mine about apparent post-circus monkey graveyards a few towns over from where we live. “Snow Angels” was inspired by and was a response to another dear friend and fellow poet, Andrew K. Peterson’s chapbook, Erasure for Holy Ghost. “Paris in the Fall” was written for Jose Hernandez Diaz in order to interact with his recurring character, “A man in a Pink Floyd shirt.” “Home” is for an old farmer who once held a shotgun to my head. “Splash Fields” is for the digital artist, Ted Chin, whose surrealistic art was used in my last book of the same name. “The Changing Room” originated from an interview I watched with Stephen King, in which he discussed a story he’d failed to write about women entering an airport bathroom and never coming out, and all the ensuing panic and disorder. I don’t know if he ever wrote it, but I figured I’d give it a try on his behalf. The poems for poet Jared Hayes were dedicated to him and his work because, for more than twenty years, he has challenged my perception of how to live and how to write through his passion for words and friendship. Additionally, those written for other writers were dedicated after the poems themselves were completed as homages to the writers and their works, from which I continue to seek counsel and inspiration in my own prose poetry.

JN: I appreciate how those dedications create a web of community around your work. I wonder what advice you might give to younger writers, especially those seeking to build their own writing community. I also wonder what you might say to writers who are interested in the prose poem, but it also makes them a little nervous.

JC: Much to my disappointment, I don’t really have a physical writing community here in WV. Young writers in rural areas, like my own, would be encouraged to find a community of like-minded individuals, and in doing so, the sharing of their literary endeavors would likely be accepted. Then, visit the local coffeehouse and start a monthly reading series. Writers will come. However, if you live in a city, your options are numerous. You simply must be brave enough to venture out into the world with poetry in hand. Additionally, M.F.A. programs, though they sometimes receive a bad rap, can provide the perfect opportunity to build and maintain literary communities. I deeply cherish all the relationships I fostered through my years at Naropa University.

As for those writers who are apprehensive about pursuing the prose poem, I would highly encourage them to read as many prose poems as possible. Aside from the other writers I’ve mentioned, young writers should read Rosmarie Waldrop, Peter Johnson, and Nin Andrews. Read John Ashbery, Gertrude Stein, and Claudia Rankine. Read prose poets whose work you admire, whose work confounds you, and read others whose work you intensely despise. Take note of where you find their strengths and weaknesses, identify why they chose against breaking the line, and when you are ready to write a prose poem, attribute those observations to your own work. Remember that while it’s prose, it is still a poem, so limiting your language to only that which is truly necessary is crucial. Superfluous language will add nothing to your piece. Most importantly, have fun, have a ridiculous amount of fun.

I will always remember fondly hearing the anecdote about Russell Edson, the “godfather of the prose poem in America,” who apparently wrote in the attic at night above his bedroom, where his sleeping wife Frances would occasionally hit the ceiling with a broomstick when he became too tickled by his own work in order to quiet him down. When I write, I always do so to amuse myself first and foremost, and I strive tirelessly to hear the figurative broomstick against the wall.