2026 Valentine Prose Poetry Contest Winners

By Flapper Press Poetry Café:

What a fabulous response we received from all across the globe for this year's Flapper Press Prose Poetry Contest! Thank you to all the poets who sent us their lovely work. It was difficult to choose just five prose poems from the incredible number of submissions, but our judges narrowed it down, and we are happy to present our winners!

To all you poets out there, please consider sending us your work for potential publication through our regular Submission process.

You may ask . . . what is a prose poem?

From the Poetry Foundation website:

Without further ado . . . here are this year's winners!

Shamik Banerjee

Sonnet Lessons

Spring's tulips limn my winter-freed garden and invigorate the air; so does her newfound passion for crafting sonnets. I choose a priceless place to coach her: the desk by my study's window that presents all of India to us. A patch of the vernal sun laps her skin and plunges on her tea as thin vapour strands dance and curl in the air. 

We start off simple with some commonplace topics: love, this unquiet city, its puddly lanes, vegetable mongers, and even spirituality. Her mind, although teeming with ideas, betrays her pen. Some words jotted. "Metre!" she screams. "Is it necessary?" and disowns the maiden words.

I use my years of expertise to help her befriend lambs, but some friendships are hard to build, it seems. A sweet little argument over perfection, and then she proceeds with her own style. "Meter!" she blurts. "It's just not my type!" smiles and reaches for the volta. I down the last gulp of my chai and marvel at the perfect metrical composure of her body and the neat alliteration of her hair and wonder how she never noticed the sonnet in her.

Shamik Banerjee is a poet who lives in Assam, India, with his parents. His house is located on a foothill, and when he isn't writing, he can be found strolling these alluring, hilly paths. He recently completed his higher studies in marketing, and although his dream is to relocate to some thinly populated, tranquil region and run a self-owned business, his current ambition is to work in the corporate sector. Some of his latest poems have been published by The Society of Classical Poets, Spelt, Pensive, San Antonio Review,  Modern Reformation, Ekstasis, Ink Sweat and Tears, and Third Wednesday, among others. He recently secured second place in the 2024 Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest.

Angela Carole Brown

John the Baptist Eavesdrops

Where have you gone? I need to tell you of the concaved chest and stern eyes in the Caravaggio that looms above me. We do this, you and I. Visit museums. Create the emotional backstory of people in paintings. If it’s too much to take, we might actually laugh. Cringingly inappropriate but our only outlet. We are mortified when asked to leave, because what they don’t know is how much the art actually stirs us. Makes us not know how to act. “Can’t take you anywhere!” we whisper to each other, jerking the last of our nervous giggles off our skin.

Where are you? You don’t know my good news. I am picturing that face when you’ve learned of someone’s good news. Beaming. Screaming, as you do, that loud shriek of unabashed delight. Of Jesus-shoutin’ and Sunday-signifyin’. Of joy so fat. You fill me up with your effortless capacity to feel my happiness with me. Teach me that trick. Such a dazzling trick. A selflessness I have yet to master. You are the kinder me. Yet have folded in—I fear—irretrievably.

The thought caves my chest. Collapses into blackened sinkholes where once eyes floated. So very like the Caravaggio. I stare at his sorcery of light and shadow in John the Baptist’s perfectly depicted flesh, reminding me that you’ve never made peace with yours. Have called it tyranny. Now it has begun the journey of actually rebelling against you, starting with your sweet heart and its stunning claim that you are unloved. But we’ve laughed so hard we’ve cried. Clung like two life preservers linked forever, buoyed across an ocean of hurts and joys. From the strength of the other, never one going under. How is that not love?

Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness suddenly stares me down, more bemused than admonishing. This figure of mystery who sees our mystery. And a brief wind prickles at the back of my neck. It’s only a woman who has passed briskly behind me, coat flapping like gull wings, but I play with it being you. That you are talking to me, a tiny star twinkling in my ear. That you see this baptizer too. Feel him as I do. That though you have decided to vanish, burrow into your pain, banish all who try to come near, you are still here. A tease so puncturing, I laugh. That thing we do! Except this time it’s just me. Lone woman. The sort people steer clear of and politely mention to museum security, for giggling before the hallowed baptizer of the Christ who bears such saturated agonizing hues. And that stare.

You would make this happen, wouldn’t you? Get me kicked out of the damn museum! Jokester! Spellcasting as ever from your apparitional perch, wherever—what ever—that is. And since it’s not here with me, I pray it is some wild wanton fantasia where there is nothing but joy, and we laugh our asses off at such a perfect prank.

Angela Carole Brown was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives and writes in Kansas City. She has published several books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including her North Street Book Prize-winning novel Trading Fours (2018) and her newest release, How the Light Gets In (2025). Shorter works appear in Brilliant Corners, Flapper Press, MacQueen’s Quinterly, midnight & indigo, Thorny Locust, and the poetry anthologies In the Black/ in the Red and Bards Against Hunger—Kansas City. She is also the author/illustrator of the multi-award-winning children’s film short The Richest Girl in the World (2021) and is featured in the documentary film The Goddess Project.

Pamela Hobart Carter 

Unrequited

Sound of rain. Smell of dampened earth. Night wraps the town in softness and dark.

You, Moon, (of course, you continue your reflective glowing from the far side of the clouds), appear unexpectedly—given the rain—as a filtered brightness like a flashlight beam through cloth.

I’ve glanced your direction as a ritual of the hour, a sky check. The sight of you, the satellite, a response; my question, What now? 

And I see it as agency—your ability to locate the thinnest cover, and so to manifest. And I see it as a gift, as if you might be familiar with me for the number of times I’ve looked your way, for those teenage years of reciting Shelley to you as I stared at your hard and pocked roundness mirroring our star. And I see our love triangle: the indifferent ball of fiery gas showering radiance, you—the small cold rock closer to me, and me, loving you forever, break-my-heart-until-I-die.

Pamela Hobart Carter grew up in Montreal. After earning two geology degrees, she became a teacher. Her collection Earth at Perihelion was the 2024 Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award 2^nd runner-up. Of her four chapbooks, two were Yavanika Press mixed-genre winners. She loves living in Seattle near mountains and water. Read more of her work on her website here.

CA Clemons

The Diva: a Love Song

         She calls her body the Diva. Not because it’s beautiful, which she had been told before but she cannot accept; but because it’s temperamental. Ever-changing in its vicissitudes of what it wants, what it needs, what it’s processing. Often making its needs known through tantrums, through whining and pain.

         She relatively recently made the connection that its quirks--its strange and sudden tics were the shards of pain still left to process. Because she thought she had numbed it all with time, with tears, with music and sex. Sometimes she saw her body as alien, not even human, thinking that explained why it did not behave or respond like other human bodies--why it was so strange in its responses and its limitations.

         The Diva made her angry sometimes. “Why do you have to be so… weird,” she asked it. “Why can’t you do what I want you to? Why can’t you give me what other bodies give their people, without question or really even trying?” Giving it a name allowed her to view it with curiosity, to stand beside it and study it objectively. What may seem like disassociation to others freed her and gave her peace about it; allowed her to look at its magnificence as something to cherish and pamper with love.

         And the more she loved her body the more it revealed itself to her, showing her more places to love, more shadows to bring to the light, more pain to feed her growing curiosity until she began to see it differently, as a container for lifetimes of experiences, not something to be at odds with but as a partner to understand.

         She started to allow its oddities. To embrace them, even. And like a pampered Diva they rewarded her with understanding. And the more she worked with it in partnership, rather than fight it, their dance became something to treasure and celebrate, until she could proudly introduce it to her world.

         “This is my partner, the Diva. She and I have come through a lot together. I learned to spoil her with love and attention, and she rewards me. And dare I say, loves me.”

CA Clemons, mother, podcaster, Reiki Master, hypnosis practitioner, medium, and now poet is from the Kansas City area and has a playful love affair with words as well as a Master’s degree in English linguistics. Relatively new to the poetry scene, she discovered within the past year that she prefers writing poetry over journaling as a way to make sense of her "Swiss-Army life."  Find her on Instagram and TikTok @caclemonspoetry.

Katherine Matthew

Your Jacket

I fell for you when I saw you try on a jacket in a thrift store. “What a stroke of luck it fits me,” you said to the assistant as you smiled at yourself in the mirror. What a shame it doesn’t, I thought. But when you left the store, I did too. You wore that jacket for years, to work, parties, sometimes to bed after a helluva party. But this wearing, this living, took its toll, and then one day a hole appeared, just a teeny one, the same shape as your bald patch. Every time you wore the jacket all I could see was the hole. And all I could think was that you had got fatter, but the jacket still didn't fit. And then I thought, What if we don't fit? So, I bought you a cool-as-a-slice-of-cucumber-in-a-glass-of-gin-jacket. A look-at-me sort of jacket. You did look at it, bemused, as if I’d bought you a matador’s jacket and I wanted you to fight a bull for me. I wish you’d fight a bull for me, I thought. But you just joked, “trying to spruce me up, are you?’ as you tried it on. Yes, I thought. You wore the jacket to work, parties, but never to bed afterwards. We’d stopped going to those helluva type of parties. One day I took the old jacket back to the thrift store. They looked at the hole, I told them it was vintage. Then I caught myself in the mirror. And I remembered you smiling at yourself in the mirror, all those years ago. I was right, I thought, the jacket didn’t fit you. And then I thought, But you wearing it had always fitted me. I took the cool-as-cucumber-jacket to the thrift store instead. I'd never liked gin. 

Katherine Matthew lives in England with her husband and two daughters and has a degree in English from the University of Oxford. She now enjoys writing poetry as much as reading it. 

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