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
or down the country, or around the country. The country, an exercise in understanding the space
of the country. I do not care if you are my friend or my best friend or a collection of memories
I can talk to about the memories you are. I do not care about meaning or anger
or hope or apocalypse when I care about laughter. I do not care if it makes sense to call you
too many times in a day until you pick up to tell you a joke you will like and laugh and laugh.
What I care about is distance as a measure of effort to overcome said distance. If the distance
between us is the country, then the effort is the world. You are a world away. I am
a world away. When I stare into the middle of nowhere, you are there laughing at the joke
I traveled around the world to tell you.
THE BAD NEWS
BY WHEELER LIGHT
You wake up knowing nothing.
The day, the shape of a chrysanthemum
bell. Unraveling is the start
of eventually hoping. Oh, I too mistake
disaster for salvation.
I take my medication the same as anyone else,
staring at myself in the bathroom mirror
to see what I recognize. My actions reflected—
the bad news is the actions.
The good news is the reflecting.
Mistaking the self for its consequences.
Mistaking the self for anything at all.
The bad news is the self.
The good news is waiting at the end
of the illuminating hallway of you.
SAWMILL RUN
BY WHEELER LIGHT
Writing about a mountain because there is a mountain.
Photographs of the mountain capture more than words
can carve out of enjambment’s live edge. Oranges and reds
at the end of fall litter my eyes with the image
I try to translate into imagery. Can’t you see the green
peeking between naked birch trees? The sun reflecting off
the fog blanketing everything? A photograph is a headstone
which mourns the moment it was taken. Up the road,
there is another overlook and another. Different angles
to view the jagged document of time, these peaks erupting
and softening over enough millennia, their existence nearly makes you forget
dry brush, pipelines, controlled burns, doe crossing the road doesn’t
make it. The present, a cloud of smoke invisible behind the cliff in the distance.
Writing about the earth because there is the earth
cracking its knuckles and arching its back.
At the overlook, I get out of the car and step on a pile of broken glass.
Wheeler Light received his MFA in creative writing from University of Virginia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Barely South, and Allium, among other publications. You can find his poems at www.wheelerlight.net.
You open the apartment door and it is just wood. Wood behind the door. You need to enter your apartment. To sleep. To work. To clean. You burrow into the wood with a small drill bore. You carve a desk inside the wood. You leave legs of the wood in each corner of the room so the wood roof doesn’t collapse on you, crushed by mahogany in the night. You wake one day and it is raining paper. A hole has split in the wood from all the paper where it was leaking from the bathtub upstairs. The paper is covered in all your upstairs neighbor’s poetry. Your upstairs neighbor is always so loud, crying for whole weeks at a time. Your neighbor is so loud the sound bleeds through the mahogany. The mahogany is now spilling into your bed, your bed you carved yourself out of the desk, the desk which appeared behind the door, the apartment which was drowned in poetry. The future that is always words.
Wheeler Light is an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Pretty Owl Poetry, The Penn Review, and Broadsided Press, among others. His work can be found at www.wheelerlight.net
This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, Dwell: Poems About Home.Purchase here.
south broadway press 