Beecher’s Contest Winners

Beecher‘s Spring 2014 issue publishes the winners of their recent contests in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction:

Poetry Contest Winner, selected by Frank X. Walker
Roy Beckemeyer’s “Tree Shadows“
“tree shadows
                   angle
    their     skeletal souls
          like  Chinese
        script….”

Nonfiction Contest Winner, selected by Eula Biss
Anne Penniston Grunsted’s “The Art of Not Turning Away”
“My five-year-old son Bobby has terrible, all-consuming anxiety at the doctor’s office. Any doctor can trigger him—his doctor, my doctor, a vet. As soon as he realizes where he is, he starts to retch. I hold him. I distract him. I gently whisper calm assurances. His service dog sits near, providing comfort the best he can. Nothing, really, helps. We just wait together for the anxiety to pass…”

Fiction Contest Winner, selected Manuel Munoz
Penny Perkins’s “Car Ride Through Corn Fields (1975)”
“She is sitting in the backseat of the family station wagon. Her father is driving an scratching himself. Her mother is in the front seat next to her father, wearing sunglasses over puffy, red-stained eyes and looking straight ahead at the lonely two-lane highway that stretches out before them on the flat, Midwestern plain. She is a child, almost a teenager. She is the almost-teenager child of her parents and there is no escaping that oppressive fact. Even now, especially now, here on a teary Sunday afternoon drive.