We are incredibly excited to announce South Broadway Press‘ 2026 Pushcart Prize nominations! Please join us in celebrating these wonderful poets.
The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America – including Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.
The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60’s and 70’s.
Pushcart Prize Nominees
FROM SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS’ SUMMER & AUTUMN 2025 EDITIONS
Caught a glimpse of you last week in the manikin room, tip-toed past a group gathered around the body that wears your face, a protection circle, as if the light they shone in your eyes some kind of candle magic to manifest the real of you from the past, from the river, from the floating, from the dead, to the today, into this rubber corpse, mechanical breath catching, as a reignited heartbeat scratches itself into the screen of their smartphone.
They never asked Are you okay? Never whispered Do you mind? Never wondered Can we make a mask? Never implored could they Copy it? Make you famous? Make you most-missed, most kissed? Your unclaimed body, claimed, controlled, sold.
You are everywhere: your face on walls, CPR dolls, written in literature, cross-stitched, encased in poetry, sold on Etsy, and I dream your no,
your eyes closed and finally they hear your no, your no in death smirk opening wide, your no as purchased faces melt into waters your no, your river Seine bursting in no rushing no through art galleries and Red Cross classrooms, your scream no, flooding the world in no, in your no bursting from doorways, in the churn of dark water pushing no into your death mask, your no into the sunshine, into fire and flame into ash into no into goodbye into reclamation.
BECAUSE EVERY GIRL HAS A POMEGRANATE POEM IN HER
BY MONICA FUGLEI
I remember last summer: three or four fruit lined up, how the French call them grenades, their brilliant speckled red, these tiny bombs.
I remember how I’d pull out the meal prep plastic – quart-sized, like a restaurant kitchen,
then how, to music, I’d drag the knife lightly along the skin trying not to draw juice from the aril, how carefully I pulled the fruit apart, catching any seed that fell.
And here is where a poet would park metaphor or simile – this fruit is knowledge, harvest like murder, fruit blood red and bleeding, fruit ripe like a thought, fruit as fertility, fruit as fecundity,
fruit complex as the woman’s mind and it’s always a woman isn’t it? With the cutting and the work and the pulling and the intricate web of hanging on, her hands – my hands – around delicate skin barely holding this juice to seed, and then my crushing and pulping and
drinking, and I would harvest the work to pass on to my children, would pause in the dripping, in the wasting, hands a deep crimson, this harvest collected moment by moment,
this quiet time in the kitchen, where I ran a finger through yellow pith and packed each ruby seed in small food storage gently, thinking about death.
Monica Fuglei currently teaches in the Department of Composition, Creative Writing and Journalism at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. A 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has recently appeared in Progenitor and Mason Street. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s usually knitting or tweeting on #AcademicTwitter.
Teaching my (step)sister to smoke in the Taco Bell parking lot
BY MONICA FUGLEI
We smoked first, remember? I thought
the tacos would cover our breath,
rolled the windows of the Mustang down,
opened the moon roof to look at the stars.
We were so young, then – summer before
your junior year. I’d just bought my first Docs,
wore baby doll dresses. Looking at the sky, I
wondered if this was sisterhood, if we finally
melted our lives together, if I had a shred
of what you had with your blood sister–if the
Marlboros, the tacos, the sky, the way we passed
our cigarette back and forth–if this was sisters
but no, it wasn’t the smoking, it was the drive-thru
fight when I forgot the mild sauce, when I backed up
the car, when I nearly hit the car behind us,
the way you yelled and laughed,
it was later when you rocked my daughter through the night
while I slept nearby, exhausted, it was later still
when you packed up your life to move home
after we learned our father was dying,
it was in the ICU when we shared earbuds
the night before we said goodbye to him,
the way our heads came together, tethered,
hospital curtains open, the way the stars
remained.
Monica Fuglei (she/her) currently teaches in the Department of Composition, Creative Writing and Journalism at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. A 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has recently appeared in Mason Street Review, a thin slice of anxiety, and The Hidden Peak Review. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s usually knitting or tweeting on #AcademicTwitter.
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