2025 Winning Poem by Joyce Victor

Phillip’s Celebration
by Joyce Victor

The guests are five men
in a row, each alone
in a cell with a slab bed,
a lidless toilet,
no windows
but always
light from fluorescents:
solitary confinement in prison.

Could be night or day
they keep in touch
through the heating pipes.
What’s up? Oh, nothing much.

They know the slow of endless time.

Phillip’s being moved
to Clayton Men’s Max.
He, a former Satanist
with devil horns tattooed
on his temples, but converted
by Timothy--next cell over
and on death row--
to the King James Bible.

Before Phil gets taken, the education
lady crosses the barbed wire yard,
and waits for Warden Gomez’s
permission for caramel popcorn.

She pushes the sticky kernels
through each door’s narrow slot
to receiving hands.
The men eat like eager mice.
No, like hungry ghosts.
Please give me more.
I haven’t tasted this in years.

When it’s time to talk about Phillip,
each shouts out, in turn,
into the hallway--
how Phillip gave away
his dinner tray

to a hungry neighbor;
the pretty women he drew
on his napkins
--fished to them
under their doors with dental floss;
the Johnny Cash he
sang to them through the pipes.

Quiet for a moment. Perhaps
Phillip takes in he has worth.
That this is goodbye from his family.

Loudly, he lifts his voice,
This is the best party I ever had.

Joyce Victor lives in New Mexico and Connecticut. She was shortlisted for the 2025 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize, the 2025 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, the 2025 Aesthetica Poetry Prize, and the 2024 Slippery Elm Poetry Contest. She finished her work as a student in the Pacific University MFA Program in 2024. Her poems have been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Appalachia, Slippery Elm, Friend’s Journal, Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, Connecticut River Review, Comstock Review and Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology.She was nominated for a Pushcart, and for Best New Poets, 2025. Her profession was as a clinical social worker. She has volunteered extensively with homeless people and in prisons, including solitary confinement. She loves to read natural history and to dance.

2024 Winning Poem by Elizabeth Jacobson

One Taste
by Elizabeth Jacobson

The Buddha said the ocean has one taste, salt, but I taste the green
alaria of the Atlantic, ropy and dense— I unwind it from the
tentacles of blue bubbles we’ve named man o’ war— and suck its
silky tendrils. I taste the eternal note of sadness from the spray off the
cliffs at Dover Beach, the skin of those I am swimming with, and
those who are now back on shore— whale sperm, sea star arms, fan
corals, barracuda piss. The essence of the deepest dwelling
radiolarian, with their intricate snowflake skeletons, rests like a song
on my tongue. I open my mouth to the sea and in floods the flavor
of Albertus Seba’s seven-headed serpent, with its slick emerald
prehistoric back and fairy tale humps. I taste a radiance from the
moon, always overhead, where dust smells like spent gunpowder. I
taste the way the black sand looked from the window of the bus
going down the west coast of Peru, an exhausted sea on one side of
the road, Shining Path shacks disintegrating into the pale dunes on
the other. I take the water in and swish it around my mouth, toss it
back and gargle with a throat full of zooplankton and single cell
organism-size bits of plastic hitching a ride in the cascade. I taste the
whale rise, their lime green fecal plumes at the surface of the sea.
Rich in nutrients, they feed the phytoplankton, which bob in the
surf like invisible friends. I taste an oil slick of sunscreen, dark globs
of sticky tar, metallic treasure chests of sunken gold and jewels,
harmful algae blooms, feces from cruise ships. I smell the dwindling
Colorado River water vanishing into human forms. I taste the
burning retch caused by two fingers down the back of a throat, a
thick coating on the tongue, the tang of scum and fetid water
tormenting its own esophagus. I taste the smell of blazing old
growth ponderosas aflame in forests too parched to resist a spark of
lightning. Our screaming bougainvillea, our ornamental grass, our
fields of corn, our poisonous syrups. There is an island in the North
Pacific where the albatross roost and die, their decomposing bodies
reveal the colorful tangle and web of petrocarbon refuse. The
Buddha said that just as the oceans have one taste, so in our lives
there is one taste, freedom, but I taste a saccharinity, the stink of
enchainment: all of us heaving the same tragic sea inside, a
continuous wave after wave of what happens happens over and
over. From the shore, the moon ascends pink above the Atlantic.
How indifferent a sea feels with its suggestion of infinity. After a
Leonid shower on a moonless night, I find moon jelly after moon
jelly tossed from the surf, high on the beach. Wanting nothing more
of water their clover-shaped insides have turned fuchsia in death,
leaving the outline of a crown at the top of their translucence.

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her third collection of poems, “There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral,” will be published in 2025 by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her previous book, “Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air,” won the New Measure Poetry Prize (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019) and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is a reviews editor for the online journal Terrain.org. For additional information please see Elizabeth’s Linktree page.

Winners prior to the Hive Poetry Collective sponsorship of the Prize can be found HERE.