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

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Fall 2015 |

Cellar Below Heaven

I can hold a grudge against a bird.

The word “done” in your mouth
becomes my mouth.

I dog-ear my days toward you,

pulling a javelin out of a see-through star.
I watch you and all the suicides

file out of the night
and toward me

asking how I know it is a star
given its clarity.

Elizabeth Metzger is a Teaching Fellow at Columbia University and the Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. In 2013, she won the Narrative Magazine Poetry Contest. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Yale Review, Southwest Review, and Guernica, among other places.