2026 Grackle Prize Winners
First Place in the Green Anole Prize in Poetry
Full Moon | by: Isaac Salazar
After Mary Ruefle
The moon tonight is a dinner plate
abandoned in wet grass,
its white face stippled with gnats and fingerprints
of milk. I carry it home in both hands
through a neighborhood of sycamores
whose bark peels off in long scrolls,
apostolic and diseased. Shedding season.
The dogs cough bones behind fences. The loose screen door
worries its hinge like an old priest tonguing a rotten tooth. Even the bayou
looks exhausted, all silver, dragging it along the concrete
stone. At the pharmacy, a woman buys twenty-seven
cans of cat food and a birthday balloon shaped like Saturn.
The cashier wears latex gloves blue as surgical hydrangeas.
Nobody mentions the encroaching hurricane though it hangs
above us like an animal carcass lowered from a hook.
I am beginning to admire small extinguishments:
moths slingshotting themselves toward patio bulbs,
the pear left too long in its ceramic dish collapsing inward
with the sweetness of a babe. Last week, I found a bird
in the parking lot, eye lacquered shut, and the ants already entering it
reverently as the white collared men enter a skyscraper
in the Financial District. Sometimes I stand very still in the shower
until the water goes cold as coins in a dead man’s pocket.
The body is astonishing then. Cabinet of nerves.
A bell waiting to be struck.
I want to die. Then the train passes
three blocks over dragging its chain of lit windows through
the dark, slow as an omnivore, each one of someone lifting a cup,
someone scratching their shoulder, someone turning away
from another. And the moon continues its patient hovering
over hospitals and the intestines of power lines,
over the parking garage with its sleepless chandelier shimmer,
over the raccoon worrying a hamburger wrapper in the alley
as if trying to unwrap a message from God.
Second Place in the Nine-Banded Armadillo Prize in Fiction
Escape from Bula, OH | by: Juan Zorilla
PART 1
Ice shards plaster the windshield of the F-150. Spring in Ohio is winter. Gail's eyes are glued to the road, she's driven in this weather before. Michigander. Ahead, the road blends with the horizon, both pallid ash. Slush everywhere.
A week ago I dreamed I flew over mud, into a grey void. Erie.
She spends an hour convincing me that the weather isn't so bad, that there are buds on the tree branches. She points them all out, the shoots. No sprouting anywhere, I only see dead wood.
Not a single car since we left. That's good, I say. Back in Bula, no one would have noticed us gone yet. We will reach the border before midnight.
•
I picture you a lifetime ago, tracing the shore in Galveston. You were so young, so pregnant. Freeing a crab from a green fishing line. That was three weeks before the slap. A year later, I was sentenced.
Seventeen years in the north and I have never seen a lake.
•
"Have you ever crossed at St. Lawrence?" I ask.
"If you mean through the checkpoint, yes, with my parents when I was a child. But we aren't going anywhere near a checkpoint. Tell me you know that." She smiles.
"I figure that, yes."
"Good." She continues, "We need to scout the residential crossings. Half a backyard in Quebec, half in Vermont. It's quite doable."
"How could that be? Property taxes would be a nightmare." The thought amuses me. I haven't done taxes in a long time.
"I dunno babe, you work it out, that one's beyond me." She reaches for my leg.
We go through the options and one by one we dismiss them. They are all a no go. Ice, currents, marshes, radars, thermal cameras, seismic sensors, drones, air pockets, vigilantes, bears, cops.
Vermont it is, then.
•
Roadkill lies on the shoulder. Wings, twigs, mud, snow. Still as death, its back turned to us. Frozen out there for days.
We coast a hundred feet past the animal, she makes a decision, the tires rattle over the line marks. Braking takes forever but we finally come to a halt. She switches the engine off. Bad idea to stop here.
I scan around the truck, a reflex from inside. She waits for me to register we are safe and climbs out. Gone before I can catch her.
Her blue-grey coveralls blur into the fog.
"Duck's been snap-frozen." Gail examines it as if inspecting a pair of hands for open wounds back at the facility. Cherries attested to her rigor. She tugs at the cold wings, dries her palms on the coveralls. The snow turns her beanie white.
"Help me out here, will you? Grab the meat bag from the back seat."
I reach behind for the blue and yellow bag. It reads IKEA. I climb out of the truck and join her as she finishes petting the corpse.
"It doesn't have a head," I say.
"It's not like we're fattening it up for foie gras babe. We'll need food, don't be precious and load it."
I pry the bird loose from the road and lift it. Eight-pounder at least, all dead weight. Frozen feathers sharp as claws, wiry legs, head snapped off clean. Veins, arteries, nerves exposed. Vivid in death. I stuff it in the bag, legs first.
Snow pounds down, sideways, upwards. Relentless. Blinding. I hoist the bag and toss it in the truck bed.
•
"Determined to mess up the Xi are we?"
A squeaky male voice. Canadian. I am unsure where it comes from. I can't see past my feet.
Ahead in the truck cabin, she's oblivious.
Fuck.
"You may not want to pick me up buddy. What's with youse tourists taking advantage of compass failures? Last week, same thing. Two Belgians picked up a groundhog just for fun, an hour later the whole county combustulates. Nightmare," says the headless bird inside the meat bag.
"Not a tourist partner." The Keds and orange coveralls should've given that away. Can't blame it, no head.
"Acting like one for sure. Not that you'd understand, but what you both are doing is quite illegal up here. Not allowed to transport farm animals on a truck bed."
"Pardon me, Professor Duck. You may be the authority on traffic laws but without a beak it's a stretch to take you seriously."
"Well, it isn't a traffic matter per se sir. It's basic husbandry. And while we're at it. Stop calling me duck. I'm a snow goose."
"To be fair, you're roadkill, so, you stay put, shut up and enjoy the bag."
I should have stuffed it neck first.
"Insults aside, you should just take my advice. If you really want to make it out of here, tell your colleague, wife, dominatrix, or whatever she is to you that you'd rather put me in the back seat."
She winds the window down. "Come on, we need to get going." Her voice is soft. The car idles.
The goose has a point, a traffic stop would undo everything.
I can't go back.
•
The sound.
Metal on metal, doors on jambs, keys, cuffs, clasps, spoons, tables. All clashing. Incessant.
The counting.
Adding. {24 / 7 / 12 / 52 / 365 (366)} 8,767.
Subtracting. 1,571 (yesterday)
I will not be pulled over for transporting a frozen goose without a head.
I will not go back there.
•
"Do you mind if I put the goose in the back seat? Up here there are probably regulations about open carry of roadkill."
"Knock yourself out, just be quick, will you? At this pace we will never reach the border. Also, keep it down, sound carries out here. The wind is blowing south."
I throw it in the backseat and climb in at the front.
We drive further east. Ahead of us, flat, leaden, dead.
The seat warmer reminds me of the south.
