2025 Winner - Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Edie Popper|Stream of Consciousness at the Blood Donation Clinic

The nurse approves my blood pressure, haemoglobin, tattoo history

so she noses in the needle. The tubing tugs me from myself and runs 

with carmine wine. Saline for the fluid lost. Citrate for the clots. In clicks 

and whirs, I infuse through centrifuge. In an hour there’ll be a bag of me 

hanging, head-down: a glad-wrapped bat, or a scoop of twilight’s burgundy 

blush. Two midnights ago, we were transfusing bag after bag. A preloved heart

was settling into its adopted pericardium; the cut mouths of newly loaned vein

roots were debating with the sutures. Returning from night shift to daylight is 

neurochemically deranged. The government was still selling steel for F35s to

bomb kids in their tents. More of the world getting sick with heat. My mind 

was finding it harder to negotiate with grief, so I came to the clinic to hook 

back into the rhizosphere. For company: a muted TV, this vinyl chair, a book

about mushrooms. These days, strangers can share the blooms of our marrow

and become unstrange. Page by page, I wander down a stranger’s brain. 

I carry a pen to mull in the margins. Someone saw these scribbles once and

called them sacrilegious. I disagree. I was asked what draws me to libraries,

bookshops, streetside book huts. I said it was awe. Awe at this vast frogspawn 

of thoughts, the work of hands, the water between us, welling from minds, 

the messy loam. The tongue of earth is circles and flows. Energy isn’t made 

nor destroyed but always seeks to metamorphose. A wandering river wends 

in and away, comes and goes, leaves us thirsty, needy, animal. And every river

needs a spring. There are many ways to be someone’s tributary. Antibiotics 

dropped to a friend’s front door. An outlaid arm, these IV lines, red rivers up 

sterile tubes. We give tribute to each other: as sea to clouds, clouds to river, 

river to sea. My thoughts are porous with the world’s great weave of words,

not unlike the undersoil: nerves and mycorrhizae. A rowdy loam where trees 

intone in pheromonal phonemes, discussing which spots to grow for sun, 

which oils to blotch near fungal blots, whose blooms have been kissed by 

which bees. Tonguing sap and sugar and feed. Not unlike the rivered placenta

where the birthing body bifurcates: porous to the new little weave, cord cut 

and bundled in foil, a first shock of cold air. Mouth bowed for milk, a mother 

open at the nipple, her tributaries of ducts. Downy head, unsutured skull, 

pillowed to the breast. This gift-thinking is what comes most easily to Earth. 

Market economies teach Darwinised minds: all dog-eat-dog and man-for-

himself. I don’t believe in it. After floods, neighbours help neighbours find

food, move mud, relight their lamps. After his daughter’s diagnosis, a father

swallows anaesthetic and surgeons give her a third of his liver. The father’s 

liver returns his gift by regrowing what was given. He visits in slippers and ID 

band, their mirrored scars crimping shut. She fears needles, nurses, nights. He

offers his hand. My own gifts to someone dying are small. Mint for the mouth. 

Their favourite songs, a phone sat slant. Swap the top light out for buttery lamps. Sorbolene rubbed down pain’s new sinews. To wash: in suds, small tub, warm

water, wet cloth. A brush, a braid, a soft hairband to unnest the knots of bedrest.Pillows: the pliable moons, soft hills of eggcup foam. Jelly, syrups, subcut meds. We measure the tempo of dying in hands. When I end, I hope someone recycles

me. My aortic valves could wing in someone else’s heart. My cornea could toss

colour onto someone else’s retina. Some are chosing to return to the sands 

through aquamation. The body dissolves in water and lye at pressure and heat. 

Leftover bone-ash is mixed with ground oyster, shaped into coral, placed on 

a reef. Seagrass roots and crabs click past your last gift to the brine that birthed our cells and salt. The centrifuge clicks twice, flicks off. I’ve rambled, and forgot

entirely about my book. Please forgive the tangents, but doesn’t the brain just crave this kind of untamed root-think? Someone comes to clamp the tubing, gathermy blood, label the bag. A small vermillion droplet blinks, 

                                                                             all done, all done: a heart-drum. 

THE MEDITATION technique instructs us to treat every thought as a cloud passing. I pretend I am Mt Fuji; Mt Fuji does not react even when it’s a cumulus clusterfuck. Ram Dass said, ‘If you want to see God, go to the emergency ward.’  I remember this as I am holding Michael’s hand. Here we are, then, looking into the googly eyes of God, slap-sticking it to us. ‘If I die,’ yells a woman two beds down, ‘there will be blood on your conscience!’ A naked man wearing an open hospital gown backwards, walks the ward, his penis bobbing like an apple in a bucket. The boy next door is handcuffed to his bed; a cop sits like a mushroom by his side. There’s a snipped ponytail on the ground near the toilet, red swollen legs poke out of fluorescent white sheets, rubber pillows roll. Mt Fuji watches clouds pass like tickertape. Michael’s jaw is trembling, but his hand is still, and I hold it; I have to be the sea wall he can crash against. He’s furious, even turned down his complimentary Endone. There’s so much water. Mt Fuji is a volcano. The man within the next curtain is being told he has cancer; his wife is a patient at another hospital. ‘We can wheel her over so you can be next to each other,’ the nurse jokes, and they laugh like they would at a funeral. He’s going to die, there’s no getting out of it. Mt Fuji is making magmatic noises like a stomach. The kitchen staff are on strike, so all Michael gets is a piece of white bread. After he eats, I watch him drift on his rubber pillow. There is no weather on Mt Fuji now. I can finally close my eyes; when I sleep, I leave scribble in the sky.

.

2025 Runner Up -Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Emily Zoey Baker |Fifty Famous Views

2025 Judith Rodriguez Open Prize - Commended

2025 Judith Rodriguez Open Prize - Highly Commended

Father Poem - Tim Loveday

Fractured Insomnia Ghazal - Edie Popper

Homeless with Ian Thorpe the Redeemer - Hannah McCann

Psychonautical: The Dolphin House - Annie Christain

The Night My Dad Left, We Ate Lobsters - Adelaide Sendlenski

A Songbook for Birds  - Carolyn Leach-Paholski

BANTHEBOMB- Isabella G Mead

inheritance - Vuong Pham

Meeting feral ends- Alisha Brown

Scintillation Wave Functions - Alicia Sometimes

Note: Highly Commended and Commended poems will be available in the Woorilla Poetry Prize Booklet 2025

2025 Winner - Louise Rockne Youth Prize

In Summer, Seagullets|Lara Chamoun

I

shame-slicked hair salted by sea-mothers / a mouth full of snail shells from the twilight of the sea / the seamother says to birth it / I say gulls / I say girlhood / a thing that keens behind my ribs like a wind-choked kite / I tried to drown it in the bath / it floated / my bones buoyant from pretending the dead things in me should’ve learned to swim / sharp girls shouldn’t be sad / my mother laughed like a wave receding / I wear that sound around my neck II

the girls smelled like dryer sheets / I smelled like barnacle crusted nails / I bit my nails down to the silence / swallowed it / thought if I ate enough I’d disappear / I watched a gull tear open a trash bag and thought: same / thought: even sky-things hunger for corrosion / flight is falling art /

III

my sister missed the gulls fighting over driftwood bones / didn’t hear how they cackled like sleepover girls / I kissed a girl behind the bleachers / tasting gloss and dwindling sandholes / she called me bird-boned and I almost said thank you / almost said look how I stay aloft with nothing but want /

IV

in the basement of my mouth the ghosts and their fading footprints rearrange furniture / I call it coping / my music / if you were a song / I don’t speak in case the wrong name escapes / the gulls circle anyway / they always knew / they tear the day open like Sunday dinner / I let them / I fold the napkins into shapes of things I never became /

V

depression is not metaphor / it’s a gull with a rusted can around its foot dragging it through the surf like a goddamn anklet / it’s a girl who swallowed her sound for fasting / I am small enough to mourn / loud enough to stay / I open my mouth at the shore / the gulls scream through me / squawking like my mother tongue / my girlhood tongue / remembering to fly wrong with backbone ///

2024 Runner Up -Louise Rockne Youth Prize

Haven Cha|Binary Fission

Someday I'll Love Summer Again - Adelaide Sendlenski

Conversations with My Father, Age Fifteen - May Obermark

Floralia - Lara Chamoun

Ode to the Familiar Smell of Home - Polina Korobitsyna

I'm sorry mother tongue - Bella Le

Little Cities - Sophie Yu

Spell To Gt Him To Speak To You - Bella Le

Portriat of Umma, Cracking Softly - Alexander lee

Wild Goose  - Lara Chamoun

Blueprints - Leonardo Chung

2025 Louise Rockne Youth Section  - Honourable Mention

2025 Louise Rockne Youth Section  -  Commended

2025 Louise Rockne Youth Section  - Highly Commended

2025 Awards Ceremony

Terms & Conditions

Competition Opens |  1st June 2026

Competition Closes | 30th September 2026

 

Awards Ceremony - Hybrid Event: 

 November 2026

 Competition & Award Dates

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