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