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

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Autumn 1987 • Vol. IX No. 4 • Poetry |

Night Is the Actuality of Things

the daylight sun, but a bright
shadow. We live in a terrible
reversal: a nightmare’s fertility
of blue gradations.

Watching for a star,
I prove that I am
nothing, nobody; I never
existed at all.

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