Brian Tierney, Third Place winner of Narrative’s Sixteenth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of Rise and Float (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the Jake Adam York Prize. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and was awarded the 2018 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Raised in Philadelphia, he lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches poetry at the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University.



THIRD PLACE WINNER


This Close to Dark

by Brian Tierney


In Every Story There Comes a Point When You Can See No Further

It’s just through that door—
On the other side I can make the moon
orange, I can miss my ma, hey
gimme a quarter, I wanna call ma.
I can say to no one or to everyone or someone
special for an hour after waking
there is nothing I want. That blue
ladder leaned against the wall out there
is a shortcut to summer.
But it’s hard to decipher
this close to dark, it’s hard to paint
a dim painting.
Emotions and forms.

People on couch
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