daniel lurie / editors' choice prize in poetry - 2nd place winner

Waiting

In the gap-toothed moment before I return 

home, I think about how you’ve left

all the lights on in every room, your stale 

cup of morning coffee in the kitchen I’ll pour 

down the sink, your strands of hair on the mirror, 

how you’ll fold into my body like I was built

for it. A friend once told me he was most in love

with his wife the thirty minutes before

he picks her up from work. Every day, 

we return to each other a little like strangers. 

On my walk back, I find a stalk of dried 

sunflowers, see an old man with binoculars

watch owl fledglings. They’re only mine, 

until I share them with you. Everyone 

I’ve ever met is arranged in the way 

I left them, with their same haircuts, jobs, 

troubles. Like how a student fails to imagine 

their teacher having a life outside the classroom 

until they find them smelling a tangerine 

or buying toilet paper in the supermarket. 

My mother used to marinate tuna steaks,

even though she hated fish, and waited 

on the front porch for my father to return 

from the office. After he’d slip off his boots,

she’d hide them in the closet, if only to secure 

a moment longer with him in the morning.

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Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer, from eastern Montana. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Daniel is co-editor of Outskirts Literary Journal and a Poetry reader for Chestnut Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, North American Review, Sonora Review, and others. He was recently awarded a 2025-2026 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Find him at danielluriepoetry.com