1. Tim Suermondt has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest

It’s Done, Beautifully Again

My wife, Pui Ying, shows me
her latest poem “I hope I did
what I wanted to do here.”

What she did do is stark and lush,
an abandoned castle, and a boulevard
teeming with revelers opening

the reserve of morning, a welcoming—
how difficult it is to merge a heartache
with a gratitude and make it work,

on the page as well as in life.
I tell her I may be stealing some
of her images—the old dynasty boats

disappearing down river on the way
to becoming modern—and I proclaim
her poem a masterpiece and worry

about the poem I’m working on, much
to be executed there, gratitude proving
slippery as a theft I would never try.

Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems, A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World, came out in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge, Mass with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.