Take a breath. Pause. Open your palms, like symbolically opening your heart to new ideas, before you read the poems in this issue. Allow the poems to transform you. You are about to step into something intimate and expansive — the kind of language that doesn’t demand, but listens. This year’s poetry contest entries arrived like small, holy messengers — each one carrying the pulse of a question, a memory, or a breaking open. We are so grateful to every poet who submitted to Segullah for our 2025 Contest Issue. The authors dared to say something true on the page and trusted us with their offering. Over the next two issues, you will see many of these pieces. I always say it is a beautiful act of creation to write. It is no small thing to write a poem. It is no small thing to let it go out into the world.
As you read the three contest winners, a subtle thread will weave its way through the poems and into your heart— an undercurrent of recognition. What do we do with the ordinary when it becomes strange, or the sacred when it slips just out of reach? In the first-place poem, Handshaking Instructions, Felice Alexandra writes, “I wish that the door to other worlds was not so easily opened” — it is a quiet ache for clarity in the face of the mysterious. Our second-place piece by Sarah Colby entitled Lamentation: Wife of Uriah stuns with its intimate undoing, a woman remembering, “You, squandered like small coin. / Me? A conquered country” as she reflects on what has happened to her. And in The Old Songs by Tricia Cope, our third-place poet confesses, “I only know the way / woolen clouds drift,” surrendering certainty while holding onto beauty and remembering her child. These poems do not try to solve mystery. They sit beside it. We invite you to do the same. Open the journal. Read slowly. Let the poems work on you like time and wind on sandstone.
