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Herausgeber: Antelope Hill Publishing LLC
Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

What motivates us to live life to the fullest, to engage in the real world beyond the all-encompassing technology of our modern age?

What began as a meme to address this question, “Touch Grass” has become the prompt for this year’s writing contest, drawing contributions from authors who have all shared a piece of themselves in response.

While some of the writings in this book address the prompt more literally with poems and short stories about nature, others focus on a variety of accomplishments, struggles, and real-life experiences of all kinds. A handful of these works have been selected for special honors as winners, but all included deserve recognition for their contributions and creativity. Many exceptional authors submitted excellent work, and it was a difficult task to restrict the book to only what is contained here.

Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present the selected works of our Third Annual Writing Contest: Touch Grass , generously sponsored in part by Will2Rise and Media2Rise.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Leseprobe

Antelope Hill Writing Competition 2023

Touch Grass

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T O U C HG R A S S

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T H I R D A N N U A L

Antelope Hill Writing Competition

— 2 0 2 3 —

P U B L I S H E R ’ SF O R E W O R D

Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present our Third Annual Writing Contest. Not only were we able to encourage the creativity of our participants for another year, but we also saw a massive increase in submissions, nearly doubling the total from last year. This motivates us to continue offering this contest, which would only be possible if our authors boldly endeavor to create something, to touch grass, and not to merely consume and subsist.

Our theme for this year’s writing contest is “Touch Grass.” We offered this prompt to cultivate fictional short stories and poems about the importance of real-life experiences contra spending time online. The Internet has its benefits, but we must not forget our roots in real-life interpersonal relationships. Authors were encouraged to write about anything from forging strong bonds, to trailblazing political organization, reconnecting with old friends, or even simply appreciating the beauty of nature. The prompt was not limited to these ideas; we wished to keep the topic broad so as to encourage a wide array of responses. As life is full of ups and downs, the mood of these pieces is not limited to only triumph, but also covers struggle, pensiveness, and heartbreak.

We would like to stress how subjective the evaluation process is and hope no authors are discouraged if their piece was not selected this year for publication or as a prize winner. In addition to gauging submissions on how well they fit the theme, their writing style, their creativity, and how impactful they are, we also were looking for a variety of responses to the prompt and tried not to include too many submissions that were too similar. Of course, we also judge as a team, meaning we need to agree on decisions. Many pieces were loved by only a couple of us or were great by themselves but didn’t fit with the collection for a variety of reasons.

We sincerely want to thank everyone for writing, and we hope to encourage you to continue doing so, whether for our future contests or elsewhere. One of our goals as a company is to resurrect and nourish a love of literature and creative writing that produces real value, a skill that has been sorely neglected and suppressed by the noise of the modern world.

We extend our gratitude as well to our generous sponsors, Will2Rise and Media2Rise, as their continued support showcases the strength of our community. We hope you enjoy these unique works as much as we have, and we look forward to many more years of sharing your talent with the world.

Antelope Hill Publishing

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P O E T R Y

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Atlas of the Golden Hair

Ǣwine

Atlas of the golden hair:

They laid on you the weight of the world,

They possessed you with their demons,

They arraigned you for your father’s crimes

Which were of their own imagination only.

Little White boy,

Let that be your joy:

They hate you because you are beautiful,

They hate you because you are great;

More free than their most fearful fantasies

And brighter than their darkest dreams.

Vart Land

Ǣwine

My land is lovely in spring

when the gardens of my people are radiant insurrections of color and fragrance

and the brief showers refresh her green verdancy,

enlivening her veins with the clear music of glacial streams

and bringing blossom to the bud.

She is lovely in the summertime

and the unbegotten noontide of her day—

the light, brighter here than anywhere

on earth, the sight unbent and sky clearer,

the waves more white and horizon-band lengthening to eternity.

And lovelier yet in autumn

my season of silences, of softness and of memory,

of fading and of reaping

of lying down and gathering together.

She is lovely still in winter,

when the blackened corpses of trees file in stark solemnity along the pale expanse of the sky,

reaching up to catch the clouds on their knotted fingers.

She is lovely in the dawning of her day, rose-pink upon a white mountainside

and lovelier still at eve, when the golden haze of afternoon bronzes to black

and dusk pours down from the mountains and crosses the plains,

settling like a comfort-worn blanket over the houses of the city.

She is lovely when veiled by a gray curtain of rain

and when she bathes naked in the bright noonday sun.

She is lovely when her newborn glory shines in the eyes of strangers to these shores

and when her name trembles on the lips of those who have known and loved her since the day of their birth.

She is lovely even in her deformity

and lovelier still in her innocence when slandered by ignorant men

whose eyes are too clouded with contentment

to see the wonder before them

and whose feet are too light with ease

to weigh the miracle beneath.

My land is lovely when I am happy

and the dancing streams laugh with me;

my land is lovely when I am sad, and bowed with the weight of the world within

and the rain-stooped trees weep in time.

My land is lovely at all times,

but never more than now.

The Good Life

Anthony Bavaria

Part One

White-collar bureaucracy especially grinding today,

return-home-hug-from-daughter erases it all.

You don’t know until you know, having children is supreme;

a new lens on your now-seen-as clownish previous life, gloom for those—into their thirties, forties, even fifties—still doubling down on depravity.

True intelligence is admitting you were wrong, deceived.

No time, son’s baseball game in twenty minutes;

the pride he has after connecting is total. From first base he checks the stands to ensure I witnessed the hit;

all previous doubts of inadequacy/raising a boy properly are undone by his smile.

Wife went out of her way tonight: bratwurst, pretzels, spätzle—my favorite.

The good life.

I need to get out of here.

Part Two

Counting down ’til ten-day work conference, a paid vacation—

no wife, kids, house.

Outside of working hours, I’m a ghost; fuck colleagues.

Interchangeable brew-pubs their default, I require more;

nothing bent (strippers, binge drinking, gambling), just solitude.

Joyed to be suburban-external, flâneur the city—

museum, art gallery, even an indie-doc screening.

My main vice is food: first something indulgent, maybe a French restaurant;

go early and order an Instagram-quality dish though I’d never actually commit the faux pas.

Inevitable post-main course crème brûlée and cappuccino;

I’ll still be ordering Papa John’s to the room later,

raid the vending machine, too—praying it has a Whatchamacallit.

Balance the high- and low-brow.

Manning the room’s king-size, I stay up late and cram it all in on the first night—reading, war film, porn—and muse how wife doesn’t get it, kids interrupt another preferred life.

All men are lone wolves, predators to a degree; this I ponder while packing Cooler Ranch Doritos down my gullet like a pre-teen whose parents are out of town,

totally content.

Four days in, an insatiable regret;

I miss my family.

Pure intake is irrelevant,

only people matter—

my people.

Artificial Turf

Koch Borler

How could you love that which you cannot trust

Yet a demand smothered into you from birth

Fed a heaping serving of accepted lies

From the golden cauldron over the covenant hearth

It was easier to confide in niche corners

For the commons suffered a morality dearth

Where hushed whispers were allowed to breathe

And prods at the beast kindled flames of mirth

This subculture wrought your entire being

It honed your nerves at every press

But the double-edged sword of anonymity

Would strike its target to hamstring success

For even a beast can train against its foe

Leer from afar, shape and tune its ingest

At the time when truth was demanded most

Beastlings of ill faith intruded the nest

Their poison laden musings dripped

From the lips of countless faces they wore

Foreign ideals they brought to share

Needless non-sequiturs, nihilism galore

But calls to violence, their finale at last

Illuminated upon the senses left sore

Yet profound clarity graced your conscience

These creatures share not the fight you fight for

The situation was irreversible

No familiar voice was left to recall

With bittersweet stirring and sunken viscera

You step into the world beyond your walls

But it was not as you remembered it

From days of old when our kind seemed small

Hidden in plain sight are your allies

For you are not so individual after all

It was hard to place trust in our common earth

When all you’ve ever felt is artificial turf

You sought out camaraderie elsewhere to profess

But soon would follow the beast and its mess

The only solution is found in times of yore

In the world you once hide from outside your door

Find your brothers and sisters standing tall

Let us finish this beast once and for all

Cut Flowers

Cloud Buchholz

Rubbing wet sand across the palms of his hands,

he watches the kamikaze rain shorten the swimsuit siesta

of sun kissed senoritas. Their bronze bodies scamper

toward the cover of a wind whipped mezzanine.

Beach towels billow over skinny arms and frazzled hair.

He casually kisses the lip of a half-empty bottle

of Mexican wine and watches the gray clouds gather

like a procession of weeping gravestones. He walks

the shoreline, letting the salty surf soak the cuffs of

his white flannel trousers.

A silver transistor radio performs a static sonata for a row

of undulating umbrellas and abandoned beach chairs.

A tube of sunscreen and sunglasses do-si-do on the misty

tabletop content to be the castaways of a forgetful tourist.

He glances at the white hair of the waves combed back

by the knotted fingers of a lustful fog. The spiteful

seaweed intercepts the sloppy caresses to flirt

with the lonely undertow.

He waits, his shoulders weighted with raindrops,

while a crescent of sunshine charms his wrinkled cheek.

As a child, he played the wind with strings of sky

and burned his dreams to stay warm at night,

but now his desires are buttons that haven’t been

sown to clothes.

He’s a man with promises to keep; two daughters,

nearly grown, and an ex-wife who speaks her truth

through vanity plates. Their marriage was a first draft

romance written drunk—never revised sober.

Divorce was the last photoshopped memory

of her Instagram-able ecstasies. He realized,

too late, that his presence was a filter to be toggled

on/off, on/off, on/off. . . .

Her adios was bitten with a guiltless grin.

Where to begin? Do I dare? Was it worthwhile?

Each word she spoke was a parked car

collecting windshield frost.

When they met, love was a Black Friday

shopping spree, both of them filling their

carts, but divorce court turned him into a

McDonald’s Dollar Menu, picked apart and

sold at cost, living on his brother’s couch.

His nights were cluttered with sleepy-eyed

reveries like squatters claiming rights.

He had no more words for sacrifice—each

shortfall beat his heart in weakening intervals

like the slop of cold canned cholesterol.

Every other weekend his daughters’ emotions

were delivered to his door, marked

handle with care. He couldn’t bare

his eldest daughter’s sertraline stare. She was

an unfinished tattoo, measuring months in

generic hair dye: pink, purple, and blue.

For her, love was a weekly subscription of

thumb swipes on a cracked phone, searching

for a man to tame her Tinder nights and fill

her empty afternoons. Her mother was a baited

hook grappling the harried vulgarity of their

daughter’s delights as if the stories were

fairy tales satiating her wrinkled appetites.

His youngest daughter was an electric windmill

decapitating condors in the California hills. Her

auto-tuned textbooks were auction houses of history

where the bones of better men were bought and

reburied in the shallow graves of migrant bidders.

She wasn’t yet embarrassed when he said he

missed her; their conversations still meandered

like bootleg cologne dabbed in the stiff collar

of stale clothes. She didn’t hesitate to answer

the phone, but each week her brisk goodbyes

required fewer excuses.

He told himself he still had his uses; an easy tool to

teach his girls that deathless courage isn’t crowdsourced,

that dragons aren’t slain for meat, that cut flowers

aren’t a prelude to courtship, that unprovoked farewells

aren’t bittersweet.

He lingers a little longer as the storm retreats. The naive

squall is a smashed porcelain platter scattered across

the seaward waves. A gray horde of clouds convalesce

around the invalid sun to mask the weak pitter-patter

of dispersed regrets.

He’s too old to pay his debts with daydreams,

too old to encircle the future in a siege, too old

to fashion a wardrobe from applause. His days are

paper dolls, frail and laid flat, kissing back-to-back,

but there is still time to walk along the beach, time

to remember and forget. . . .

The afternoon is an embering cigarette perched in the

delicate fingers of sunset. The breakers furl and collapse

against the shallow crescent of sandy sediment then

disappear in the primordial current.

The Beauty of the Druid Folk

Jeremiah Burns

The beauty of the druid folk,

Who dwelled in hills in time before,

And with the ancient willow spoke

The tribal beauty of yonder shore.

In nature and in gilded wood,

In harmony, the druids wove

A spell and song where soft they stood,

And against them, nature never strove.

This soaring song spoke not of peace,

But neither did it speak of war,

For balance did the druids keep,

Of Tribal Beauty on yonder shore

Together ’neath the boughs of tree,

The druids dwelled in Nature’s arms,

Life Unrestrained and always free,

As Their Mother kept them safe from harms.

But times have changed and I have cried,

A sadness striking to the core,

For mankind bears no welling pride,

For Tribal Beauty on yonder shore.

With axe and saw, they hew at oak,

That saw the dawning of the land,

And sees now beneath man’s vain cloak,

The bitterest poison of his hand.

The willow stands and soft she weeps,

For the loss of those times of yore.

In solitude, her visage grieves,

For tribal beauty on yonder shore.

How can all mankind pay no mind,

To loss of life and nature’s end,

When they seek only death and grind

The shelter given down into sand?

I stand and weep with willow’s drove,

With oak and ash and sycamore,

Together in the sullen grove,

Weeping for lost beauty on the shore.

Consuming Current Things

Anya Colgan

E-Boys and the death of

the masculine intellectual.

The yoke of modernity

or how I learned to love grabbing the fence.

The ebb and flow of high finance,

humanity hostage in its cryptic, semitic dance

the nihilist chant “Collapse! Collapse!”

Ted K the new saint and savior

to this lost generation of fatherless dilettantes

no more slap dash blue collar beatnik masculinity

only soft hands and the inability to touch grass.

No more drunken poetic squalls in

dirty bars with saw dust floors, just safeness

and sterility. Bare lightbulbs uncovering

the desperation of bachelorhood now called incel.

The sexes are broken only because “society” tells you it is.

Close the laptop. Live life away from keyboard and find a wife.

Cut down a tree and carve yourself out a life.

Kinda, Sorta, Roughly, Circa

Sue Denim

Do you know the feel of grass?

Can you describe it to those who don’t?

It’s like a rug, wool, flax.

It’s like, it’s like, it’s like,

kinda, sorta,

roughly, circa,

but not.

Have you ever spun a girl in a waltz?

Can you describe it to those who have not?

From the tension in one’s arms,

to the rotational speed and weight?

It’s like many things,

kinda, sorta, roughly, circa,

but none.

Description, theory, retelling,

testament, instruction, recounting,

are no substitute for the real thing,

a trade, a sport, a skill,

a journey, a place.

They’re kinda, sorta, roughly, circa,

but not.

Do you seek something in life,

or something kinda like it?

Someone or someone sorta?

Somewhere or somewhere roughly?

Sometime or sometime circa?

Nobody shoots to kinda hit,

bets to sorta win,

looks to roughly see,

studies to circa learn.

Will you?

Will you kinda, sorta live?

Roughly, circa be?

Or leave it to others?

Let them shape the world,

And hope that it still fits you?

Touch Grass

Frank Figueroa

Wake up, White Man. Stand tall, take heart.

Touch grass, clear brush, ford streams, scale cliffs.

Cross seas, ride waves, walk paths, tame beasts.

Drive out, move in, claim lands, name peaks.

Touch grass, till soil, plow fields, sow seeds.

Fell trees, plant roots, trim buds, bear fruit.

Catch fish, milk cows, keep bees, grow crops.

Build barns, tend lots, shear sheep, hatch eggs.

Touch grass, skip stones, make hearth, save weald.

Sweep dust, rake leaves, scrub dirt, wipe panes.

Spin yarn, sew shirts, lace boots, shave chins.

Work wood, mold clay, mine coal, light lamps.

Knead dough, bake bread, chop veg, fry meat.

Fill mugs, toast health, quaff ale, sip wine.

Dress smart, braid hair, ring bells, toss rice.

Pray songs, earn sway, ban debt, trade goods.

Touch grass, read myths, paint life, tell jokes.

Shout hymns, lift weights, prize art, slow down.

Wrap wrists, don gloves, clench fists, spar friends.

Doff brands, tip hats, shake hands, slap backs.

Write Mom, tune strings, learn Bach, awe Dad.

Forge bonds, hone skills, train youth, shun vice.

Keep score, place blame, take stock, make plans.

Win minds, steal hearts, stir souls, hold hands.

Steel nerves, trust guts, doubt doubt, flee sin.

Lend ears, lift eyes, keep calm, mind time.

Get big, stay lean, dig down, hang tight.

Purge dross, oust thieves, probe depths, wrack brains.

Love few, seek kin, speak truth, be brief.

Hate well, bide time, play fair, fight foul.

Know when, waste them, love God, spill blood.

Strike first, hit hard, punch up, go low.

Burn ships, bind wrists, raze towns, salt earth.

Strike fear, let loose, kick doors, wring necks.

Load shells, lift arms, breathe smoke, taste lead.

Aim small, cheat death, bring fire, give Hell.

Wake up, White Man. Stand tall, take heart.

Touch grass, tour graves, nurse wounds, bear grief.

Hug wives, dry tears, find kith, crown kings.

Do good, face fate, live full, die once.

A Harrow (Hörgr)

fipres-rabsyr

You lay beside the gate.

Deadening silence, catching fate.

The broken sticks, breaking down

Feed the stain of my sullen brow.

Memories fade and tears fall,

Through the dross and drab, the eagle calls;

Will you come back to me, my old friend?

Lay at my feet—so I can feel again.

Here you rest,

Head in paw.

No strokes or games,

Just numbness remains.

A harrow now your home.

Near a place you knew before.

Your spirit flew away,

Gone,

Too soon.

A Coast

Marcus Hammervoll

I sit on the skerries at my coast

And I contemplate.

There is nothing special about my coast,

My coast is a coast like any other.

There is little tranquility left now at my coast,

It has been broken down by the bile and bilge

And bitter waste of the machine.

Its slime and sewage are seeping into my soul.

I sit at my coast and I contemplate

Whether or not it is possible to escape from the machine,

To make a break: to cut the cords, to sever the shackles.

My being has been manufactured for me by the machine

And I find I have been turned unhuman.

How does the wight regain its weight, the spectre its soul, the lost his love?

I sit at my coast and I contemplate.

Haiku

Hereward

Fat frog sleeps at pond

no tadpoles in the water

species goes extinct.

Oppai neko chan

watashi onii-san kun

the Neet dies alone.

Dirty PC desk

mountain dew bottles on floor

mother makes tendies.

Catholicism

defended on internet

Somalis burn churches.

E-arguments won

facts and logic triumphing

nothing accomplished.

Sensitive young men

stay plugged in online all day

the west has fallen.

Bare feet on the grass

birds are singing in the breeze

not angry now.

Men alone tremble

fear is the heaviest chain

men with friends are free.

“Hikes with friends” need friends

männerbunds are made outside

friendships created.

Gains obtained at gym

you gotta get up to move

can’t get swole sitting.

The good men live well

the enemy seethes in rage

White babies are born.

Lotophagi Blanket

Sean Holmes

The softest Hell is so inviting

wrapped in silk and velvet

a world of sleep, of idleness

content with the lotus-fruit

that fills the mind with cotton

To say I was alive would be deceitful

a stupor without dreaming

to cast off from that land I could not

but Friendship freed my mooring

their radiant company warmer than any bed

A Journey of Remembrance

David Humphrey

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