TCP’s annual summer poetry and fiction contest grows each year, and has become one of the events our-staff is most excited for. Toledo has untapped great writers, eager to be published. Deciding this year’s winners was a challenge. In 2013, we updated the contest, asking for Twitter poems (restricted to 140 characters) and Flash Fiction, which is limited to only three sentences. Aspiring writers had to be fast and furious with their words. Enjoy.
Twitter Poetry: Poems comprised with 140 characters or less
Winner
Untitled
El ir y venir The coming and going
de las ondas of waves
como gente que concimos like people we know
By Mary Rios
Runners-Up
The Paper
Old Skool Hip Hop Disco.
Take the kids to Sunshine.
Absolute ragtime car show.
Reconnect with rhinoplasty
or adopt Milly today.
By Brenna Duggan
Press On
there is no us
in u.s.a./or
bu.s.iness;
so
blow your whistles
manley/snowden/assange
press, press
your lips to the whistle
& blow
those sweet liberating keys
By Sam Wright
Flash Fiction: Works of fiction in three sentences or less
Winner
A Game of Chance
Two old white men sat around a flat-screen TV blaring news from the war. An aspirin factory had just been bombed in Damascus, and one of the men fumbled in his wallet for a crumpled twenty. “You’re a fool still betting on Baghdad,” the second man chuckled, folding the bill before putting it in the pocket over his heart.
By Eric Pilcher
Runners-Up
The End
As time races on, I hold on so tightly I can hardly breathe. Each memory plays back in my mind with perfect details like an old classroom projector from the seventies. When the film runs out and begins to flap over and over, I smile while crying and put down the weight of the world because it is the end.
By Nina Beckford
I Should Have Bought MP3’s
Boy and Girl meet and fall in love.
Boy and Girl break up a couple years later.
Boy can no longer find any of his CDs.
By Brandon Ridner
