The 2026 Variant Lit Poetry Prize Winner’s Announced

The 2026 Variant Lit Poetry Prize Winners

Judged by Todd Dillard

Variant Literature is excited to announce the winners of our inaugural Variant Lit Poetry Prize as chosen by Todd Dillard! Congratulations to first-place winner Zoe Berger, second-place winner Chiwenite Onyekwelu, and third-place winner Emily Portillo. Each winner will receive a cash prize and their winning poems can be read below, accompanied by a note from our judge. We’ve also included a list of honorable mentions whose work made it to the final round of judging.

Thank you to everyone who submitted their work! We are so grateful you trusted us with your writing. And a special thank-you to our wonderful judge, Todd Dillard!

A Note From Todd Dillard

Friends have asked me what it’s like to judge a poetry contest, and I have wrestled with how to answer this question now for months. It’s not like being a journal editor, where a shared vision informs an issue’s curation, where you can love a poem but know it “doesn’t fit” in the same way you can’t park a 747 in a rodeo. And it’s not like browsing books and feeds for poems because the work is specific and targeted… at you. I know this because I don’t think I’ve read so many beautiful horse poems in such a short span of time; those of you who submitted sure understand your audience! (Me.) (Thank you.)

Ultimately it’s, well, joyful. I read so many damn wonderful poems. Poems that usurped form. Weird poems. Tender poems. Poems that put trauma and delight in a boxing ring and deployed stanzas like fighting rounds. It was such a pleasure to read them, sit with them, get to know them, and, by extension, have reaffirmed once again that there are a tremendous number of wildly talented poets out there, writing in tremendously different styles and yet achieving consistent heights of beauty and craft. I highly encourage you to look up the work of any of the poets on the shortlist; each one deserves your attention and adoration.

Still, because this is a contest, I had to find some sort of metric to identify which three poems were my winners, and I was fortunate enough that this came to me naturally while going through submissions: there were simply three poems I couldn’t stop thinking about, poems whose confluence of craft and voice and image and metaphor had me slipping back into their files to reread them again and again. So that’s ultimately my answer: judging a poetry contest is a way to find a bunch of poems you love.

I am so, so honored to share with you the three poems I couldn’t stop thinking about the most:

First Place: Zoe Berger

I come into the kitchen to tell you I love you

and then don’t. In this iteration of the trolley problem
I begin by tying myself to the tracks. I am thinking of ways
to appropriately ask out my endocrinologist.
I am mistaking care for romance again.

I think a funny statement tee would save me. Like I need
another way to never shut up. To stop me from saying
something bad you eat me out on my outdoor table.
Afterwards I throw up on your [REDACTED].
The wrong thing always comes out anyway.

In the morning searching for my panties, I find a dead bird
under the table. We don’t get into it. On the train back from a poetry reading
I see a man in a shirt that says EAT PUSSY, IT’S ORGANIC. I think about
sending you a photo but I won’t. I don’t think something I love so much
should make me feel so bad. I am talking about poetry.

I am imagining the moon a flashlight through a busted floor.
I think god is a cop and he’s purposely shining it in my eyes.
When he shoots stars I see holes. Look at me out there in the world,
listen to all that nothing! I am on my street talking to no one.
Notice my mouth, opening and closing.

“I think Zoe Berger’s “I come into the kitchen to tell you I love you” briefly made me go insane. It’s funny, it’s striking, it’s weird, and it has this velocity, this energy I can’t look away from without pulling a muscle in my neck. The scatter and leaps it presents are as smart as they are ribald, and the way the poem captures what we don’t say, how our interior’s stream of conscious is less trickle and more Lethe white rapids, is incredibly fresh. It’s the one poem I couldn’t stop thinking about, and I am delighted to award Berger first place for it.” – Todd Dillard

Zoe Berger is a poet and writer in New York. Her work appears in The Poetry Society of New York’s journal Milk Press, Antiphony Press, Wild Roof Journal, and Thimble Literary Magazine, among others. Zoe is the Poetry Editor for Pinky Magazine and an MFA candidate in NYU’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Brooklyn and can be found on Instagram @sadspot.

Second Place: Chiwenite Onyekwelu

Mirage

What we found in the infinite lush is green.
The clean bone of lime, the lowered arm

of birch. Grass calls to dew in that same voice
as my father calls to me. I am teaching him

to walk again. I measure my pace
to guide his body disfigured by a stroke.

One foot at a time; one quivering step
before the next. The end goal of stroke is to return

the body to its infant state. I knew the man
and now I must know the boy: my father

who, like a child, has lost control of his legs,
his machinery for speech. In this journey

there are no onlookers, only squirrels wide-eyed
on a branch. I tell him to please try,

by which I mean to let go of shame. Inside
the grass cicadas chirp; crickets sing

aloud underground. Silent, we practice, like two mute
men learning the language of love. It breaks

my heart to see the pain in his eyes; it breaks
his heart to see the pain in mine. Hope—

a melting ice, a mirage that keeps shifting
grounds. From a leaf a praying mantis leaps

and my father lifts, successfully, his foot.
I tell him you just moved by yourself, as if his wound

has blossomed a rose and the miracle pulling
his leg is not my hand. Forgive me, father,

for all the lies I told you out of love.
There was never water ahead. The pool

glowing in the distance would have disappeared
if we got to it.

“”Mirage” by Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a masterclass in enjambment and architectural metaphor. I can’t remember the last time I was this delighted or stunned at a poet’s use of couplets, pacing, line breaks, voice, and how to weave those into a structure that augments a poem’s subject. How the poem renders movement and doubling—a father become boy, a son becoming father—is stunning and heartbreaking. The line “I knew the man / and now I must know the boy”—tattoo it onto my lungs. If Onyekwelu ever writes a book on craft, I will be the first to buy it.” – Todd Dillard

Chiwenite Onyekwelu is the author of the poetry chapbook, “Exiled” (Red Bird, 2025). His poems appear in Hudson Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Adroit, and elsewhere. He won the 2026 Blossom Poetry Contest and was shortlisted for The Coppice Prize, the 2025 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry, the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, and the Black Warrior Review Summer Poetry Contest. He also won the 2024 After the End Poetry Prize organized at Oxford University, PRISM International’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Contest, as well as Hudson Review’s inaugural Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize. Chiwenite holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy (B. Pharm) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria.

Third Place: Emily Portillo

And Now a Word From Our Sponsors: The Open Tabs in my Head

Here’s a trombone and a trombone
playing pigeon. Not what you were
after? Have a rafter pigeon,
gutter pigeon, pigeons congregated

into gargoyle crowns. How about
that immortal night, a baby under
each arm, loonsong and fireflicker
on all our faces. Oh, the smoke

in our hair, thick as August. Oh,
don’t forget to pay that ticket.
Don’t forget sometimes clouds
spill from streetlamps and some

days are the heads of daisies
floating downriver. Don’t forget,
there’s almost nowhere light
can’t reach and here it is,

choosing us. This cat basking
in the urgent warmth of the stone
stoop. This walnut shell, hollowed
then filled with flower petals.

According to a study I just made up,
life satisfaction can be measured
in number of Shrek quotes per day.
And all cliffs have saddles or

footholds if you seek them. And
if you stumble across a painter
watching Pixl Girl on a bridge
by the river, there’s a 96% chance

your willingness to interrupt his
solitude will win you a damn good
story and a YoCrunch cap full
of M&Ms. What if we could be

the sound of an oar in still water?
What if we could strum the phone
lines like a banjo? Would Noah
and all his aches pour down the blue

iridescence of that song– what
was the name of that song?
You know the one, the bugs and
the chords, the end and the ethereal

not dead yet. We’re not dead yet.
We are geese honking gleeful over
the maraschino glow of the lake
as we near our beloveds. We are

the man with the radish, pointing:
look at the raingleam. How it ripples,
kisses the hiddenmost of the awning.
Look at the outside world, grisly

and gallant and piano keying
its way through the train car
no matter how far or fast we go.
Look at the shadow of the dancer,

ever more romantic than what
and where it came from. Look
at what we can be: windows
turned mirrors turned skyward.

“Emily Portillo’s “And Now a Word From Our Sponsors: The Open Tabs in my Head” is half undersea internet cable gushing Google searches and half fire hose with no holder unleashing images and verve and brilliance over the car fire that is *gestures everywhere*. The music in the language, the dexterity in the leaps, the way each image is rendered and immediately grabs my attention and refuses to let it go. It’s the kind of poem I love best: one that demands my closest attention, and still rewards me with new discoveries.” – Todd Dillard.

Emily Portillo is a queer poet, mother, and shameless partaker in delights. Her work has been honored as winner of the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Contest, and Peatsmoke Journal’s Summer Editor’s Prize. You can read more or get in touch at emilyportillo.com.

Honorable Mentions Selected by Todd Dillard

“Two Poems about the Men in my Family” – Bhavya Bhagtani

“Market Price” – Bethany Bruno

“Things that aren’t” – Jen Hallaman

“SNATCH” – Suzanne Richardson

“Oliver chooses the mite” – Jane Zwart