FEATURED POETRY

By Ethan Le [First place] -- The century teaches us to rely on robotics, playing friendly with an artificial being. We celebrate machines that string words together, while children in Gaza string empty water bottles across scorched courtyards, praying for a drop of rain in the barren wasteland. Knowledge once asked us to sweat, to wrestle with silence, to carve meaning by hand. Now we drift, weightless, our thoughts prefabricated, our days dissolving into the hum of servers.

By Yutzil Virgen [Second place] -- A horn blares somewhere behind me. Metal against metal. Voices shouting across the street. The sound pulls me back into my body. The light has turned green, yet I remain still, hands resting on the steering wheel, staring down a street filled with places I once called love. Three restaurants sit on the same block. From where I’m parked, I can see each of them if I lean forward just enough. It’s strange how every time I pass this street, my

By John Grey [Third place] -- Can my heart be a guide to old kisses, a trip-tik through time, first names and nights, a stash of intimacy so potent, it takes a memory to hold it in? Why keep a moment in mothballs, a sigh in a suitcase, a moan in a decades-old moon? Must it single out this dawn or that one? Can only the survivor claim it all? I've been with you forever it seems but everlasting has a starting point. And before then? To you, the abyss. To me, moments of ext