Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Sept/Oct 2017 |

Dream of Presidential Exchange as Birdsong

                                                     Starling and
gaudy jay. Accusatory. Feeble and broken sounds
throughout the brighter debate. Air and years of service.
Mossy logs as podia. Quick flourishes, wing-flashes,
nearly savage equipments of that sort. Reputations,
impugned, chilling the encounter. Form in hand-in-hand.
Let danger come. Defiance, as spoken from deep
library chairs. Appearing at ease. Polished
mahogany. Each considers his maleness
weakened; his days the only admissible trophy,
their own self-interested agenda their dialogue, their
bullet the only debt you owe.

David Blomenberg
David Blomenberg’s chapbook, The Mohicans Series, is forthcoming from Echo Vents Books. His work has appeared in Artifice, Poetry Salzburg Review, PRESA, and elsewhere. He works and writes in Indianapolis.