Smooth Challenge Winners

Life is rough, sometimes; we could all do with a little smoothing out. In the entries to our Smooth challenge, there were stones and fur, water and ice, the wind over soft skin. Congratulations to Kate Kastelberg, our winner with ‘New Stones in the River: A Life Insured’, a truly lovely sestina that indicates loss but gathers memory into joy. “The years since the river was born,/ I have sat on its stony shores, passing/ time’s spells: feel roughshod rock turn to velvet as lilies bloom right/ from the water’s surface, slowly at first, earning/ their place in the sun.” Kate’s terrific poem is a reminder that a stricture — like one of our challenge rubrics — can be a gift rather than a constraint, an opportunity to take a concept and make it one’s own.

Judah LoVato, a runner-up in our Book Club Challenge, places second with ‘Silky Silence’, which conjures a Wyoming winter, cattle breathing steam into the cold, the sounds they make echoing our prompt, mooth/smooth. We loved the “brown gutter-ruts of hoofprints” roughening the surface of this poem, the “hide-hard buffing” that softens the stump of a tree.

Interesting to note that some of our entries contained the word ‘smooth’ and some did not: we like the lateral as much as the literal. Cathy Holmes’s ‘A Waveless Lake’ has a narrator diving into summer water, feeling a mother’s arms in its caress, reflecting on her own body as she ages. The water is soothing, not directly smoothing, but the idea is beautifully clear. Ayva M’s ‘Pancake (verb) -’ is a prose poem rich with molasses and memory, bold in its rush of language and imagery. Zara Blume in ‘how it feels’ gives us the sensation of smooth in tofu, in matcha, in rose water… this is a delicious poem of feeling we can sense on the skin.

Thanks as always to all our creators; we’re wishing you a smooth and silky end of the year.

You can check out the full list of winners HERE and learn about our current challenges below: