Poetry Week 2026 First-place winner:
BY KIM MANNIX
Copyright is held by the author.
I bought a bouquet of tulips.
Red, your favourite. They thrive in an empty wine bottle.
Chalky windowlight dawdles in while the coffee brews.
It will snow later, long and heavy, they’ve warned.
Weeks yet until my garden’s first earth bursts arrive,
tulips, creeping thyme, salvia. Days and days
until my nose is thick with the smell of turned earth.
I look for you in the logic of perennials, reliable.
Tight-fisted peonies, holding back, insisting
on a certain simplicity even as they flair pink.
I’ll kneel where shadows are longest.
Dirt under my nails like inheritance. I’ll pull tough weeds,
feel the snap in my palm as stalks break
or better the tug and give of knotted roots, if the soils surrenders.
But now, it’s still winter. I have no grand declarations
about loss, what that means after years and years,
except birthdays are for missing more.
I think of a photo on an old calendar.
An owl’s wing imprinted on the top of snow
after he’s swooped down for a quick, cold kill.
Delicate but defined strokes
where each feather’s landed, for a moment.
The absent spot where a mouse or hare was.
It’s like this, isn’t it,
both the impression and the vacancy
for so many seasons.
Kim Mannix (she/her) is a journalist, poet and short fiction writer who lives and creates on Treaty Six territory near amiskwaciy-wâskahikan in Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada. She is a contributing editor of Watch Your Head, a climate crisis anthology, a poetry reader for Ex-Puritan literary journal and currently serves as president of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous Canadian and American journals and her first book of poetry, Confirm Humanity was published with Wild Skies Press in October 2025.