First Place
Marjorie Buettner has published two books of poetry by Red Dragonfly Press: Seeing it Now (haiku and tanka) and Some Measure of Existence (haibun), the latter of which won the Haiku Society of America book award. Her most recent chapbook, Dakota
Dreaming (2024), won the Poetry of the Plains and Prairies award sponsored by NDSU press. A native of North Dakota she has lived in Minnesota for 50 years.
Unknown Territories
By Marjorie Buettner
I drank their darkness,
their secret silences,
and their words,
these prairie poets I knew.
They would wrap their dreams
around me like sheaves of hay
shocked. Nightly, I stood sentinel until,
leaning into
the first rays of light,
dew drying in the morning sun,
I would bend and breathe
into the prairie wind.
I bless them and the clouds
that continuously drifted
across my morning sky
like a ship ready to depart
to unknown territories
beyond the horizon,
sailing without destination
in sight,
living for the journey itself.
Second Place
Bonnie Larson Staiger, a North Dakota Assoc. Poet Laureate and author of two award-winning poetry collections: Destiny Manifested and In Plains Sight (NDSU Press) lives on the high plains of the New American West. She often writes about that life and a view of the world observed from there.
Time Travelers
By Bonnie Larson Staiger
~ after the James Webb Space Telescope
At sunset we hike to the scenic overlook
at Scoria Point in Billings County.
This vast silence disrupted from
the parking lot where a radio laments
George Strait’s Amarillo by Morning.
License plates reveal we’re surrounded
by the last of summer’s noisy tourists
passing through from the Sunflower State,
the Prairie State, the Beehive State.
We shake our heads at these slogans
because we do those here too. For now
the earth is scorched in desiccated heat,
the wind knows it will be left alone
soon – strafed by winter squalls in ochre
and frost stretching across the Badlands.
Here decay is abstract art. Veins
of volcanic red rock thread through
the buttes from a prehistoric pulse –
sometimes quarried to make ruddy roads
unrolled for miles. Under twisted stars,
an unknown galaxy’s dust and gas
stretch light into longer wavelengths –
a redshift in the spectrum – a heartbeat
billions of light-years away. Voyagers
unable to recognize what they see.
Third Place
Daniel Luttrull is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. His essays and poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Lamp, Front Porch Republic, First Things, America Magazine, and Nimrod International Journal.
Leone is Driven to Church
By Daniel Luttrull
He parks his car, gets out, and walks away.
In frigid dignity, she keeps her seat,
remarking to her grandson’s vacancy:
“He driveth like Jehu.” She’s quoting Kings,
where Jehu drives in fury over Israel
to kill off wicked Ahab’s line at last—
a wicked future razing a wicked past.
Flipping the visor down to fix her hair,
she sees him, shrinking, on the mirror’s fringe,
the boy whose curious fury hurled them
over the Sunday streets to leave her here
alone.
And then she shudders like a frozen
motor cranking over:
Whump,
Whump.
Perhaps she has a weakness, after all,
for boys who hide themselves in a manful pose.
Perhaps she sees the dust-enveloped roads
of her own springtime, luminous again.
Perhaps she treasures how her neighbors’ forms
bulged and blurred as she was barreling past.
Whatever it is, she doesn’t say—she laughs.
She sways across the lot in wavering gasps.
Stumbling, she grasps the church’s heavy door,
composing herself, only to laugh the more.