“Swimmer’s Ear” by Miriam C.R.

Spring 2026 Winner in Poetry

The head is an ocean of consciousness, always swelling.
Thoughts ebb, imprints on the synaptic sand.
A crash of bubbles; a tarried wind-swept wave;
there is a future I must float to.
Buoyancy is not noiseless.
Struggling means a shouting,
a straining subconscious.
Monologuing is a makeshift raft,
a savior from the muddish twilight depths.
Can I talk myself out of despair?
Unsteady inhale, my breath shakes more than
the refracting sky, blue in the sea.
Anxiety are the glittering fish,
a jeweled fusillade that catch and net me.
I’m the whirling, flailing foaming beast
When all these thoughts pool.
The mind is a stream of gull squawks
that call, call, call.
The lighthouse-voice of a friend
is the settling exhale of wringing ends.

From the poetry editors…

This poem stood out to us because of the creative way in which it expresses the overwhelming feeling of one’s own thoughts and thought process. The way that one deals with thoughts in addition to feelings of anxiety is not easy to put into words, but “Swimmer’s Ear”, with the connection between the ocean and one’s mind, depicts these emotions in an effective way. The poem’s syntax, fractured and splintered by its end-stops, slaps one in the face with wave upon wave; it pulsates in the rhythm of breath and submersion, dipping under the surface only to spit back up for air. We are caught in the moments between whirlpools of sound, within fragments of contemplations that echo and dance with the speaker’s inner dissonance, played out across puns and polysemies that stimulate one’s reading of the poem and adds an underlying air of wit beneath such serious subject matter.

Congratulations Miriam,

Lucas Betancourt, Carolyn Malman, Julia Smith