A. Jenson
The Funerary Pin
our cedar rose is from a funeral
these things can be hard to throw away
even standing beneath a cedar tree
even cutting trail through a cedar forest
the fallacy: brittle bodies like ours are meant for boxes
our cedar rose for a glovebox
yet we cross the continent
we go for walks together at low tide
did you ever see a plover’s nest
did you chip at mussel shells until they shone like ivory buttons
did the buttons and eggs make you think of weddings
two birds fought over a crab and it fell from the sky
I know you’ve done this—
watched over a smaller life until you were certain
it will walk on its own
what if I told you that dying is neither lonely nor immediate
that we die by dilutions, by eons
going places we could never have predicted
pinned to someone’s lapel
an emptiness in the bellies of egrets
the thumbprint on the back of a mystified crab
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Our 2025 Poetry Contest Judge, Blas Falconer, says:
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“Funerary Pin” is a quiet, resonant meditation on how we carry loss—not just in memory, but in objects, places, and gestures. I was struck by how absence hums beneath the imagery: a cedar rose, mussel shells, a crab falling from the sky. The poem moves with a steady, deliberate rhythm, and the end-stopped lines give each thought room to settle. The language throughout is quietly musical, pulling the reader through with its repetition and movement between image and reflection. I loved the shift from concrete detail to something more philosophical—the idea that we die “by dilutions, by eons” rather than all at once—redefining death as something slow and cumulative. The closing images—the funerary pin, the hunger, the thumbprint—are particularly powerful, impressions of what grief leaves behind.
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A. Jenson (they/them) is a trans writer, artist, and farmer. Hailing somewhat from Southern Appalachia, somewhat from the Midwest, and somewhat from the Pacific Northwest, they are hard at work on a manuscript about home. You can read their most recent work in 2024 issues of Arkansas Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Cult Magazine. Their work is also featured in the Washington Queer Poetry Anthology, to be released in 2025. Find them on Instagram at @adotjenson.
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Blas Falconer is the author of Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024); Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books, 2018); The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012); A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007); and The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2006). He is a coeditor of The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Falconer’s awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, and the Barthelme Fellowship. Born and raised in Virginia, Falconer earned an MFA from the University of Maryland (1997) and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston (2002).