The winning submission is “Destined Together,” and the runner-up is “The Ordinary Outing.” Again, these are alternative titles, the submissions are for the 2025 Press53 Poetry Award, so the poets are unaware if they have won.
Destined Together begins oddly and somewhat humorously, a man casually takes out the trash, urinating on the lawn, and takes in the view of the stars and lighting of his neighborhood. It ends with a joke about writing his name in the snow if only he had drunk enough. The poem is not the usual poem one would expect, it sets an unserious tone to the submission. The second poem titled the same as the submission is denser and is memoir-like. It digs into the era of the poet’s birth and introduces relatives. It ends dark revealing that street thugs caused the death of their grandparents. The poem was too concrete, having no poetic elements to it.
Skipping to poems that Head Editor Tom liked, the second to last poem is about the poet’s son and them playing basketball. The poet then reminisces about their coach and suddenly their son makes a move. For the first time, it’s stated he didn’t mind losing to someone. The poem was sweet, but also concrete. The next poem was about a man opening a folder that has another folder in it, and so on. It’s about getting into the depths of digital clutter and at the very end, his finger slips, and he closes all of it. It builds anticipation and then has an unsatisfying end, what was the point of the poem? Another interesting poem, which Tom found to be funny was about the speaker buying a mattress and the whole household and neighbors checking it out. Everyone was lying on the bed and bouncing on it. And it lasted till nighttime with everyone in bed and turned into… well to group sex and then everyone went to sleep.
I’m still uncertain of the selection of “Destined Together” as the winner, but it is not my decision to make. Now, the runner-up submission had many LGBT+ themes, romance, hints of drug usage, dark humor, and some brief mythology. This submission had more appeal to it than the winner. The first poem describes a person staring at the screen of a handsome man. And is suddenly filled with regret. Google Translate was used in this narrative, so it seemed this man didn’t share the same language as the speaker/main character. Then it mentions about twinks and PreP. And I found these terms are related to homosexuality and HIV, which set the LGBT theme for this submission. The poem leaves the reader to interpret the situation of the relationship.
The second poem was about Thailand, drugs, tobacco, and partying, it was short but did not have much going on. The next poem seemed to condone cheating where two people get together and share secrets they haven’t told their partners. One poem was based on Greek mythology, of Orpheus. It sounds like a retelling of the story in a modern light, where the environment is in a kitchen, but the poem is too abstract for me to understand outside of the original tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. The next poem is about forgiving a family member. This was one of my favorites in the submission, it was personal and somber. The family member wished the person’s existence to not have happened. On a good day, they could be having fun playing games and on a bad one, this happens. The speaker critiques family, where people are made to live with each other. And the last line about them being a scapegoat took a while to decipher, but it’s a great line, the speaker was being used as a scapegoat and verbally abused. With the theme of LGBT, in mind, this poem has more to it than what is stated. The issues appear to revolve around the speaker’s sexuality, and they’re constantly looked down upon because of it.
Mostly because of the poem about family matters, I found The Ordinary Outing to be the better submission compared to the winning Destined Together. It was likely that the usage of drugs was also a negative factor for the submission, but it still took second place.
My internship with Press53 has come to an end. The journey was quite an experience, the process was more flexible than I had imagined, and it is thanks to the GSU’s organizations which include advising, internship, and career services teams. Staff members such as Daniel Holmes, Dr. Mark Noble, and Dr. Shannon Finck were very helpful in the English internship process. As well as Tom Lombardo, Press53’s editor, who had wished me kind farewells and possible future career opportunities. This internship concluded faster than I thought. If it is required of me, I still have plenty of notes of other submissions that I have worked on.
