Amidst all of the wonderful submissions we received, including our three Honorable Mentions, I am so pleased to announce that the winner of Lit Shark Magazine’s July-August Poem of the Month contest is Carolyn Martin, who writes beautiful, imagistic, and at times heart-wrenching poetry.

Her winning poem, “There Is a Beautiful Creature…,” which launches off from Hafiz’s “There is a beautiful creature living in a hole you have dug,” takes this concept and walks it in another, more realistic direction. Where Hafiz’s poem toys with the idea of the creature literally still living and not wanting to come out, despite the persona’s love for them, Carolyn’s poem follows a persona who comes across the remains of what they later deem a beautiful creature. After looking at their bones, and imagining the shape of their body and how beautiful their body must have looked while in motion, while alive, they cannot help but see the beauty in the late creature and celebrate the life that was once lived. It’s such a gorgeous, thoughtful, and yes heart-wrenching poem, and for those like me who honor The Day of the Dead, All Saints’ Day, or otherwise perform other practices to celebrate life and memories of life, I have no doubt you’ll find a little bit of “home” in this poem just like I did.

For each contest, the winner will receive a unique digital broadside of their winning poem, and the one I created can be found below. When I read this poem, I thought back to my childhood of finding foxes, raccoons, opossums, and deer, and also reveling in the beauty of the ones that were living and didn’t know I was watching (or more than likely, knew but didn’t mind). I think there’s a beautiful duality between the gruesomeness and grief of death with the beauty of what/who lived first, with memories left behind to grieve. With all of that in mind, I leaned into trying to represent the beauty and memorialization of nature and life passing. I hope you enjoy seeing it as much as I enjoyed creating it.