Matthew Gellman, Third Place winner of Narrative’s Seventeenth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of Beforelight (BOA, 2024) and The Understudy (Four Way Books, 2025). He earned an MFA from Columbia University and has received several honors, including an Academy of American Poets Prize. Gellman lives in Los Angeles and is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.



THIRD PLACE WINNER


Weddings of One

by Matthew Gellman
A black bird pauses mid-swoop
over the yellow-green canyon,
still as if not in wind, not even
in sky, but behind a display.
People on couch
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