Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize – 2025

From left to right – Seraphim Walker, Jake Farrell, Robert Kelly, Amanda Fields

The Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize is sponsored by the English Department at CCSU. It was created by former English professor Barry Leeds to celebrate the memory of his daughter Leslie.

Winner: Robert Kelly

Finalist: Seraphim Walker

Finalist: Jake Farrell

Judge: Amanda Fields 

2025 Winner

“Giant Multicolored Universe Spider”

Robert Kelly

All the Universe in my grasp

With chalk in my hand.

I stenciled free will and design on the knee scraping pavement.

Iris and Pansy line the edge of the canvas

And kiss the rim of bucolic summer.

I flicked my tongue through the hole

Where my teeth used to be,

Pulled hard this morning

On rabbit ears flopping off my feet.

Above me in watch and waiting,

Synaptic branches of the oak host

Spiders suspended in time.

Fractal lines and shining silver threads

Catch their bodies like constellations.

I stare at them,

They stare at me.

I read them anew with each passing day.

Dewdrops like diamonds destroying their cradle,

Dewdrops like destiny smearing my chalk.

At night I see them in the sky through my window

Abdomens eclipsing planets,

And I, cosmologist, caught in the sticky gaze

Of the arachnid’s black hole eyes

Giant Multicolored Universe Spider,

Spins her web within me and I pin it down,

Draw her jewels on the black velvet of tar and indigo space.

When the sun sets, crawling off the driveway,

Scuttling home for supper.

Atlas Never Shrugs

Who holds the hand of he

Who holds the world?

Atlas not met with many

Introductions.

But wouldn’t it be

Sublime?

To lose one’s burden

To space and time?

Hunchback no more,

Fling the cerulean marble

Through splatter-art

Stars.

A promise that non-gravity

Will uplift and carry,

Carry far,

Far away.

When it is lost,

No boomerang:

Continuing through

Inconsequence.

Stardust in the

Pillars of Creation;

Can emptiness reclaim

Sorrow?

But what of these

Callouses

That scorch my shoulders

And my hands?

Blood taxed is never

Redacted,

And without the Earth,

No name for these wounds.

2025 Finalist

Look Again

By Seraphim Walker

Lift your chin

to the smell of Summer’s fade

paving the way

for the cold warmth of Winter.

Scattered leaves soon decay.

Watch.       

And listen. 

In the Bleak Midwinter,

let your gaze rest upon

the field’s woolen blanket,

bare trees drawn

by ball-point black ink pens

against candle white paper,

the whimsical whistle of wrens.

Temperature reaches to touch its toes,

allowing feathered frost to lay

on the water’s surface.

It’s going to rain.

2025 Finalist

AMERICAN STIGMATA

Jake Farrell

Behold, the moonlit scars of American Stigmata…

The burning night horizon, the dead prairie summer, the crickets have stopped

Farmhouse where the widows revolver rusted

And the bedroom light never turned off

Orbs dancing in dusty tobacco barn

Singing blues, field hollers with broken devil banjo

Blood stained their crop

And drowned with scurvy steamships offshore

With eels living in Mississippi skulls

And barnacles creeping on wedding rings

The night the general store burned down

The night the dust bowl maggots raped the harvest moon

The night the railroad zombies ate the cattle

And lived in our bourbon jugs