Established in 2002, revived in 2023
Listen to Maja Lukic, inaugural winner of the Sita Martin Prize, read “Your Mother Knew Many Words for Beauty and Used All of Them to Call You” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25). Audio recorded by Reed Turchi at Second Take Sound. Maja Lukic is a Brooklyn-based poet. She received an MFA in poetry from …
Listen to Ranudi Gunawardena read “Girl Cousins, Pixelated” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25). For this poem, Ranudi was honored as the runner-up of the Sita Martin Prize for Shō No. 6. Ranudi Gunawardena is a Sri Lankan poet whose work explores the wombscape, childhood in rural landscapes, and the uncanny in nature, among others. …
Listen to Jae Nichelle read “alternate timeline” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25). “I began this poem thinking about the cyclical nature of time, specifically relating to my matrilineage and my family’s fraught relationship with the bodies of water around us as Louisianians. We face the persistent threats of floods and hurricanes while relying on unsafe …
Listen to Danielle Shandiin Emerson read “Sometimes, she listened to his stories.” from Shō No. 4 (Winter 2023/24). We nominated this poem for a Pushcart Prize. “I wrote this as a sort of release from a lot of complex father and mental health related emotions. It’s written in third person to sort of distance myself, while …
You should talk about the field of dying alfalfa, / the golden straws that scratch your grandmother’s / legs when she returns from the river, and the fleas / jumping to her swollen ankles.
Dear Ryuichi, I live in a universe where / the sound of rain is your fingers tinkering / with the keys.
you beautiful beautiful stupid haunted girl / you lawless thief of daddy’s face and mummy’s grief / you daughter of the pomeroon
prepared to be bare chested for the first / time in public. Fear I’ll be breaking / some cardinal rules.
praise: for the sisters putting on rubber suits for each other / praise: for preparing the day’s catch with soy sauce & pan-fried onions
My excised uterus cramps with a phantom / womb’s labor pain, hard as that is to fathom.
Rolling fields kiss the edges of town, farmland / lying flat and fallow like the rest of us.
There's a certain surrender / to being an optimist—one which begins / with the day but, in fact, begins // with the evening.
When I say moon, I recall brown calves lowing / at night, sheltered under their mothers' calm grace / in star-studded pastures.
We’re all something else / to someone else. Maybe he became better, a person / who hated sharing a body with the person he used to be.
the turkeys arrive while I’m deciphering / the if this, then that of taxes.
"I was thinking a lot about human mortality and environmental catastrophe, and how we all are momentary in the world"
One / becomes my aunt. Enter AUNT in wide / angle shots. Flickers form infinite / possibilities cast on that screen.
as abecedarian. Beehive. Corner cabinet, desk / detritus. Earthshine. Faultline. As gristle and gall.
It’s true—the scene is charged / with a heat surpassing what I endured to arrive here.
