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The following poem won an inaugural Editors’ Choice Confluence Prize, as selected by Ryland Shengzhi Li, Rowan Beckett Minor, Matt Snyder, and David Green. The following commentary appeared on the Confluence website on 18 July 2026.
letting the moon
into your lung
the bullet hole
Michael Dylan Welch
Such an arresting image builds, line by line, from a feeling of “slightly off kilter” to shock and then trauma and death. The first line, subtly, sets this up with the phrase “letting the moon.” How does one “let the moon” do something? Then comes “into your lung”—such a vivid and unexpected image. The last line wallops you, finally making clear the exact violence of this moment. The moon, most commonly an object of beauty and celestial calm, portrayed at a distant, peaceful remove (or reflected benignly in water), is now tied to this clearly horrible, human and terrestrial event.
—David Green
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