After one of the toughest judging periods in our 3+ year history, we are proud to announce the winners of Lucent Dreaming’s 2020 Poetry and Short Story contests. Read the winning poems and short stories below, and in our upcoming 8th issue. Our winning pieces comprise the judges’ unforgettable favourites, often timely, some dark, and some that bring us close
2020 is here and with it our brand new competitions! Submit your short stories and poems by May 2020.
In such a small town, everyone knows everything about everyone else. Their address, their birthday, their mother’s maiden name. You have grown used to living in a town where your skin is peeled away, layer by layer, your soul dissected and presented for inspection to people with nothing to do but exchange secrets behind cattle sheds. Sometimes when walking the
I speak to the jeweled creature carefully Not knowing if my height, volume, alien skin is frightening Its exterior, an emerald case of ocean and wind design A puzzling mix of purpose and randomnessAs if within the pronouncements of infinite indecipherable shapes and symbolslies a holy skeleton key Its glow, an act of sympathetic magic;Captured sunlight refractedMy eye’s net pierces dimensions,
the moon is a shivering pan of milk. A dog bowl is left out, knocked over by her barely still a boy. He snuffles his wayin through the backgarden gate, crossesthe kitchen, stares into the singing emptyof the fridge, finds nothing. He talks to her in shoes left by the hall, leaves sock-padded quiet up the stairs. He forgets to lock
The child has broken the window with an orange. I heard its music from the parlour below. The child has spelled my name with his sharp little stars and hide- bound sun and I need only glance to know it, for the pattern is the same: six long shards encircling something other. That is how I spelled my name under the
Joe, I thinkI heard his name called at the stationleaning against the post of a rotten framea wet cigarette dangling from the crumbling flesh. Joe, a voice inside echoedas if a stick figure something like an arm moved holding a can of the cheapest brew he could afford he spat black tar to the wind. Content in the fumes of
When the signal interruptsYou glitch, pixelatedly, scattingFrom pose to frozen pose. I like those unguarded framesOf your face in in-between state,The upturned eyes,the incomplete gesture,Which makes you looklike a martyred Saint. The buzz and burr of yourMechanised voice seemsApt for these loading days Eleanor Bradley is an English teacher and lives in a tiny cottage in the Cotswolds with her
The woman who I take to be my grandmother takes a long time to come to the door. I can see her moving about in the hallway, inching closer but taking her sweet time about it, stooping to do god knows what. The wobbly pane of glass in the door distorts her movements, so she looks like she’s swaying. I’m
She had done it again. Naked under her duvet, a man lay beside her; a new one she’d found at the pub last night. I watched them through the open window. She sat her back flat against the headboard, knees pulled to her chest while he sprawled on her mattress, a starfish of weathered skin, and muscles shaped by the pulling
A gentle wolf resides on the horizon. A painter’s dream of aquamarine settles in the sky, the mystic palette come to life. A secret hue whose magic truly changes your perception. There is teal in the heavens, aqua in the seas, and turquoise in the hidden in-betweens. This is a destination of the other-worldly that ripples in waves like tropical
This land has long been shrouded in white sheetsstained with blood leaking from various cuts scribbled on her skin by jackals’ teeth and hyenas’ paws. Every effort to take herto the grave dissolves like salt slipped into water; for scavengers are here throwing their talons and beaksinto her skin, breaking her, bone by bone, haunting and hunting everyone trying to rescue her
