A Vintage Posture 

Prose Poem: Everything in its Place

Write a prose poem – a poem written in a paragraph instead of lines and stanzas. It doesn’t rhyme or follow a structure, but it should still feel poetic. Use strong images, emotions, or rhythm. Think of it like a poem hiding inside a short piece of prose. Any topic welcome.

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At the edge of the house where the floorboards remember footsteps nobody has taken for years, I open a drawer and the silver breathes out–old coins, a ribbon that still smells like a summer that refuses to be current, a photograph folded at the corners like a paper harbor. 

Outside, rain argues with the gutters and the streetlight stitches a seam of gold across the pavement; inside, the kettle hums like a small confession, and I listen to its patience. 

Memory arrives in small increments: a button with a name on its back, a ticket stub curled like a fallen leaf, the stubborn geometry of a laugh that lived here once and left an echo in the molding. 

I press my palm to the glass of the window and learn the temperature of the night; the city exhales and I count the exhalations as if they were my own. 

There is a kind of making–of rooms from absence, of sentences from the hush between heartbeats–where grief becomes architecture, where longing becomes furniture you can sit on when noon is tired. 

I set things back, not to tidy the past but to give it posture, and the house agrees, folding itself around the small lit things, holding them as if they were keys.

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A pro contest 
Prose Poem contest entry

A place for Everything and Everything in its place.