2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees
"We Make Our Own Mountains" by Joshua Borgmann WE MAKE OUR OWN MOUNTAINS We have no mountains, only corn. From the ruins of wild grasses, we've made ordered files of seven-foot forests that cover hundreds of miles, and we grow them only to grow more corn. A small percentage feeds our forlorn cows; more is destined for adventures in hybridization, the expectant pollen doomed to sterilization - the plucking of the children who trudge the rows. Harvest comes and we make our own mountains from surplus seed piling up at every elevator, abandoned without a single protector, hopefully oblivious to the snow and rain. These mountains of corn taunt me with an indifference That tempts me to climb and sink down into their kernels.
"Pentimento" by Phoebe Bubendorfer PENTIMENTO She was born between two realities her body in one, desires in another. She managed this confusion with razor blades, the lid from a tomato soup can. Her mother, beat down by her own heartaches failed to notice the locked door the rusty blooms on her daughter's white socks the cut that wouldn't heal. One night with a yolk-colored moon shining through branches of the old sycamores she walked into those trees and never came out.
"Hope" by Shelly Hamlin-Rodrick HOPE The sunset on my drive home was ginger and crimson- gleaming clouds like fingers, a palm in purples, fists of dusky blue! It was a beating heart, a fiery womb of a photo, that I could not take- pull the car over; it'd be gone. I wanted to paint it, or compose its sound, though I could not truly speak- all those angled colors! If I could go toward that light, I would not be afraid.
"(trauma)" by Kevin Hosbond (trauma) the things pile up- that bottomless mouth at the end of your driveway, my hill of unwashed garments, slices of words on our plates
"Ketchup" by Hilary Naab KETCHUP I hate ketchup. It's not ketchup's fault. Ketchup didn't do anything to me. It's just every time I see a crimson pool on a plate I'm taken back to being seven - to Bosnia, to the war, to the refugee camp - to being covered in chicken pox and the doctor camouflaging me from head to toe with a bright red paste. It looked like blood. I thought I was going to die. That we were all going to die. Some of us did. But I lived and came to America - to Iowa - where they put ketchup on everything... except for steak. Ketchup on steak is a big mistake. And I don't make mistakes. I survive.
"Hyacinths" by Maeva Wunn HYACINTHS It's the third day of Spring and death is coming on light, winged feet like the withering that starts at the tips of every petal a darkening so gradual that it's hardly ever seen it creeps slowly up every stem and swallows every bud until the husk that's left is nothing like the man that we remember from childhood.