Nearly 100 local poets submitted works to our 2025 Xpress Poetry Contest. That number is more than double the amount of entries we received last year. The theme for our latest contest focuses on life in Western North Carolina after Tropical Storm Helene.
This year’s judge, Michael Dechane, is the author of The Long Invisible, a poetry collection that was published in September. He had the task of selecting the top three poems.
Dechane chose “Climbing Trees” by Guy Mead (who won last year’s contest) as the 2025 third-place finisher. “This is such a beautiful, understated poem that handles a primary image of the loss and damage from the storm — fallen trees — in a slanted way I really admire,” Dechane writes. “My favorite thing about this poem is how it manages to imply such an honest hopefulness without coming anywhere near the platitudes or saccharine assurances we’re often tempted to offer in the wake of unthinkable tragedy.”
Rose DiStefano‘s “A Little Piece of Peace” placed second. “What a devastating elegy,” Dechane notes. “We’re all weighing the cost of Helene, even after the official rainfalls and damage in dollars have been totaled. This is a poem that carries the heft of our deepest losses, even as it raises quiet words of honor for the dead.”
The contest’s top prize went to Asheville resident Margaret Belk for her poem “The Collective.” In addition to writing poetry, Belk works as an N.C. Education Corps high-impact tutor at Lucy S. Herring Elementary School, volunteers with Our VOICE and is part of the 2025-26 racial justice facilitator cohort at the YWCA of Asheville. Additionally, Belk is an active member of Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church and notes that she enjoys “writing, creating art and spending time outdoors with people in our amazing community.”
In selecting her work, Dechane writes: “So many poems never get beyond our sense of sight, but in ‘The Collective’ we find lines finely attuned to the sound of the storm. ‘Yanks limbs loose from its nightshirt’ is an amazing image coupled with the perfect moment for its surprising layers and potential. I love that the speaker of this poem only needed to relate a tiny bit of conversation; a fragment that meant enough it could stand for so much of what is beyond anyone’s words. And best of all, I think, is the haunting way the poem leads us all back into a silence it both creates and that we’ve all shared before.”
Congrats to this year’s winner and runners-up. And thanks to everyone who submitted to the contest. This year’s contest meant a lot.
The Hop Handcrafted Ice Cream will host a reading event for this year’s winners. The gathering takes place Wednesday, April 30, 6-8 p.m. at The Hop – West, 721 Haywood Road.
The Collective
by Margaret Belk
Since the storm,
the sound of wind
yanks limbs loose from its nightshirt
sending them flying, slamming, splintering—
its trunk laid to rest, roots splayed.
Rain pit-pattering sputters into rolling waves gushing
greedily creeping out of bounds;
rising, rushing, staining.
Images racing, running
back to the end of September.
“That wind, that rain,”
a neighbor says at the mailboxes—
the silence of knowing
tethering us.
A Little Piece Of Peace
by Rose DiStefano
Around the time that dusk turns to darkness,
I’m driving downhill on the narrow road.
He’s driving up the road in a white van.
I’m angry, despondent, over the death of my son.
The man in the van points right towards the alley.
I misunderstand, lose my temper, jump out,
and berate this supposed stranger encroaching
on Homeland Park. Suddenly I realize that this
is no stranger. He is my neighbor, the painter.
He is the father of two little girls who parks his van
in the alley. I walk towards his window and apologize.
Tired and spent, we part ways. He pulls towards home.
I begin to drive out of the neighborhood.
Unexpectedly he appears from Cottage Drive walking
in my direction. We don’t speak, yet he reaches out
his right hand. I reach out with mine and we shake.
His hand is a working man’s hand, a hand that caulks
and sands, that brings new life to weathered wood.
It’s a hand that checks his daughter’s forehead for fever,
that paints rainbow clouds above his front door, that
turns the pages of a good book, and flips pancakes
on Sunday morning. He lets me know that we are ok.
He gives me a tiny piece of peace. I needed that.
The man whose hand had reached for mine, who had
lived, loved, worked, and struggled, four doors down,
was taken by the raging river, taken by the storm
that slammed these mountains and left us standing
in disbelief. And i can’t go by that river now without
remembering his kindness.
Climbing Trees
by Guy Mead
Now that I am old,
I notice baby oak trees.
When I was young,
I only noticed the massive old knurly ones,
with their interesting limbs for climbing.
Now that I am old
I see the limbs of small trees
fragile thin
green with rain
like the arms of babies
my own arms
and into this growth flows
a new childhood I’ve never known.
