We’re so pleased to announce that we have chosen a winner for the Spring 2026 Black River Chapbook Competition. A big, heartfelt congratulations goes to Danielle Cadena Deulen for winning the prize with her chapbook Our Fathers Leave Us. Congratulations also to this year’s finalists and semi-finalists. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Spring 2026 BRCC!
Our Fathers Leave Us will be published by Black Lawrence Press in June 2028.
Entries for the Fall 2026 Black River Chapbook Competition are open through October 31, 2026.
Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of four books and a chapbook. Her most recent poetry collection, Desire Museum (BOA Editions) won a 2024 Lambda Literary Award. Her previous publications include Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, which won the Barrow Street Book Contest, American Libretto, which won the Sow’s Ear Chapbook Contest; The Riots, which won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award; and Lovely Asunder, which won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. She served as a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has been the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poem-a-Day (poets.
Selection from Our Fathers Leave Us
Our Fathers Leave Us (1)
By the campfire, our fathers stop playing their guitars, say, “Listen to that wind through the pines,” and we fall for it, close our eyes because we are dutiful children—testaments to our fathers’ will. The sky glimmers like onyx cufflinks, like the dull eyes of donkeys, and while we are listening, our fathers scuffle into the shrubbery, lie down, and begin to die. Out of the ferns and wild witch hazel grow plastic tubes puncturing the veins in their arms, saline bags hanging high in the pines, and we wonder how we could have missed it—the erratic notes of the pulse machines and the doctors pounding on their chests, saying “dammit” and “hold on,” a light dew on their foreheads.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” we demand from our mothers, but they only shake their heads in unison, say, “You know how they are.” For the first time, we realize we don’t know how they are. The undertakers arrive early in beat-up trucks, appraise us with silent bombast. They smoke cigars, are lovelorn—used to be our fathers’ best friends “before the accident,” they tell us.
“What accident?” we try to ask, but a sad, muscular teenager walks into our periphery, breathing hard through his nostrils. “This is our bastard brother,” our sisters tell us, hanging from the shoulders of their recent ex-boyfriends, the keys of smashed cars in their soft fists. “He’s our fathers’ namesake,” they say. We are also namesakes.
At this point, our fathers tremble up from their deathbeds of wild mulch and moss, ask us to forgive them:
“If you don’t forgive me, I’ll never survive this,” they say. “The doctors are done. You’re the only one who can save me now—please forgive me. Please, please forgive me…” Their eyes are weak and wet, and because we can’t bear to listen to what they say, we forgive them.
They die anyway.
Their wake is a long parade of strangers with casseroles and banal anecdotes. Some try to make us eat what they’ve brought, placing their hands on our shoulders and offering up forks of indiscernible food. We dip our fingers into the tepid Spinach Florentine, thinking of our fathers’ last words to us, wondering if it was just another setup for a fall, like the time he told us that we’d find Santa Claus up our inoperable chimney if only we climbed far enough. Our mothers were at their mothers’ houses that Christmas. We didn’t know why. After a comely nurse gave us a dose of antibiotics and sutured our elbows shut, our fathers took us home to their liquor cabinets, said we were adults now, we were disillusioned, and made us Rusty Nails until we slipped into blackout.
We sip bourbon as our fathers’ lovers, all dark, long-limbed women, walk in. Unlike the other strangers, the lovers all bring the same dish: green olives rolled in cold slices of prosciutto. They say it was our fathers’ favorite after making love.