Pushcart prize XLV, 2021: best of the small presses

In the event / Meng Jin

The master's castle / Anthony Doerr

Blake Griffin dunks over a car / Matthew Olzmann

Milk / Jane Hirshfield

Touch / Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

Upright at Thyatira / Darrell Kinsey

Late rumspringa / Austin Smith

The red one who rocks / Aamina Ahmad

Fall River wife / Peter Orner

Entreaty / Catherine Pierce

A town somewhere / Ted Kooser

Teamwork / Shawn Vestal

Iowa / T. R. Hummer

The samples / Kristopher Jansma

The rules / Leila Chatti

Post-NICU villanelle / Joyelle McSweeney

Howl palace / Leigh Newman

Vows / David Means

Composed / Brian Swann

The golden age of television / Karl Taro Greenfeld

A season in hell with Rimbaud / Dustin Pearson

The lonely ruralist / Janisse Ray

Charlie / Colleen O'Brien

Object lesson / Claire Schwartz

Aunt Job / Nickalus Rupert

Fifty-eight percent is concrete road, 12 percent loose sand / David Wojahn

We at Old Brids welcome messages from God, even if unverifiable / Annie Sheppard

Alive / Natasha Sajé

The book of fly / John Philip Johnson

Anatomy of a Korean inheritance / Esther Ra

The missing are considered dead / V. V. Ganashananthan

The out & proud boy passed the baseball boy / Josh Tvrdy

Longshore drift / Julia Armfield

Hoeing beets, 1964, Skagit Valley / Samuel Green

Marceline wanted a bigger adventure / Shena McAuliffe

Something street / Carolyn Ferrell

House of prayer / Alycia Pirmohamed

Qassida to the statue of Sappho in Mytilini / Khaled Mattawa

Laramie time / Lydia Conkilin

Meteorology is the science of remembering the sky stays relatively the same / Inam Kang

The shame exchange / Karen E. Bender

On the overnight train / Alice Friman

On the footage of Monet painting / Samuel Cheney

Sycamore / Stanley Plumly

Turner's clouds for Plumly / David Baker

Give my love to the savages / Chris Stuck

Childish things / Chirst Forhan

Adagio / Robert Pinsky

Return of the blue nun / Madeline DeFrees

A beloved duck gets cooked / Lydia Davis

Letters / Ilya Kaminsky

Freak corner / John Rolfe Gardiner

Untitled / T. C. Tolbert

Rivers / Jo McDougall

The fifth hour of the night / Frank Bidart

My father recycles / Naira Kuzmich

In a good way / Polly Duff Kertis

And I thought of glass flowers / A. V. Christie

Chastity / Siqi Liu

It's not you / Elizabeth McCracken

Remembering John L'Heureux / Molly Antopol

The night drinker / Luis Alberto Urrea

A refusal to mourn the death, by gunfire, of three men in Brooklyn / John Murillo

Governing bodies / Sangamithra Iyer.