After It’s Gone Challenge Winners

After It’s Gone received a wide range of elegies mourning people, relationships, childhood, places, and older versions of the self. The strongest poems approached loss through small, grounded details rather than dramatic revelation, letting memory and ordinary moments carry the weight.

Across the top entries, what stood out most was the honesty of the writing and the different ways each writer chose to sit with what remains after something important has shifted or disappeared.

🏆 Winners

evening moments by ali

ali keeps returning to the same streets, even after the friendship attached to them has changed shape completely. The image of asphalt “poured in soft” and hardened underfoot turns that walk home into something the speaker has to physically carry.

I Never Knew by Edward Swafford

Edward Swafford builds the piece around the unbearable delay between witnessing and understanding. The child who noticed “hellish hematomas” grows into an adult capable of naming the violence clearly, but the clarity arrives too late to become protection.

s o n by Kristen Balyeat

Kristen Balyeat understands how childhood disappears in small, ordinary ways. Jelly Giraffe sitting untouched in a drawer and the missing lullaby playlist land so hard because the poem keeps noticing things only after they’ve already become memories.

The Years We Didn’t Use by Paul Stewart

Paul gives The Years We Didn't Use its weight through accumulation rather than revelation. Shared rooms, unfinished conversations, and years spent adjacent to one another accumulate quietly until “what never was” becomes the loss that lingers most heavily.

Candid by Kristen Keenon Fisher

Kristen Keenon Fisher mourns a version of life that existed before everything became something to capture and replay. What makes the poem hit is that the speaker isn’t outside that change either: “I wept. / I recorded. / Uploaded.”

🎖️ Runners-up

• Tiny Hinge, Pink Myth by Iris Obscura
• You Taught Me What You Let Fall by Caitlin Charlton
• Bowel Movement by Marilyn Glover
• Tasting Sound by Silver Daux
• Before We Put the World in Our Pocket by Leslie Writes
• A Slice of Sky by L.C. Schäfer
• R.I.P To The Girl Who Gave a Fuck by Sara Wilson
• the drowning diver (to my former cis self) by Tyler Clark (they/them)
• Buried in the Holler by Tim Carmichael
• Beneath the Bird Cherry Tree by Cristal S.
• The Last Day of School by Hannah Moore
• Wide Open Time by Aubrey Rebecca
• Echoing Memories by K.B. Silver
• Still Here by Pixel Floyd
• Grieving the Living by Natasha Collazo

🏅 Honorable Mentions

• Sorrow in the Sunflower Land by George Roast
• The Boy Who Lived by Cali Loria
• Love, Bipolar by Kera Hollow
• The Universe and Pocket Change by S. A. Crawford
• Stain by Guia Nocon
• We Used To… by SUEDE the poet
• The Duck that Passed Before Me by Paul Aaron Domenick
• "sundowning in the club" by kp
• The high end of a medium low by Sean Balogh
• Dad by Travis Dylan

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