Brian Tierney, Third Place winner of Narrative’s Sixteenth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of Rise and Float (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the Jake Adam York Prize. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and was awarded the 2018 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Raised in Philadelphia, he lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches poetry at the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University.

Three Poems

by Brian Tierney

Osip after Siberia

Because all shovels on the permafrost snapped,
even Earth refused the in-transit dead—

the mad, the sick, the lice in December: how they pulsed


like planets on a few lucky blankets
in our long-damaged cosmos, the promises of words.
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