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

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Franke Varca

Franke Varca received his MFA in poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and cofounded the University of Houston’s undergraduate literary journal Glass Mountain and its conference for emerging writers, Boldface. Some recognitions include a Discovery/92Y Poetry Prize and a finalist designation from the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Among other places, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Poet Lore, and Southern Humanities Review.

Extinction

Summer 2024

King’s Syria

By Franke Varca

windows blown out in each of seven roomswhatever could be thrown was thrown to hurt —burned joists, elbows stuck like spokes from bodies skinned umbrellas, barrel-bomb cocktail stormsdummy doll eyes — plaintive nights, […]

Extinction

Summer 2024

Deh Bala Wedding

By Franke Varca

It wasn’t inevitable, not fated, crystalline nor sepia as the dream of perpetually falling knives like raindrops — being one-half large cleaver, being one-half perfectly eviscerating. It never had to happen how, […]