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

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Winter 1956 • Vol. XVIII No. 1 • Poetry |

Ontology for Beginners

Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks . . . . .

              —Hart Crane

The daughter is wed to the delighted father
In a mystic sacrament with paper rings.

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I find most women like the Cyprian maid Before her skin had metamorphosed from Ivory into flesh, before the numb Hardness of her lips had soft repaid Soft lips, before […]

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