The final results of the 2026 Big Moose Prize are in! And the winning manuscript is Division of Birds by Jessica Roeder. We are thrilled to welcome Jessica to Black Lawrence Press!
Excerpt
Once upon a time—I thought as I walked—once upon a time in this country, a woman died in the forest. If she’d expected to die she would have stayed home. She would have kept to her bed, though her husband wasn’t there, though he hadn’t been there for so long he could only have known of the baby by conjecture.
She fell the way a tree falls, straight out, with her feet in the shade and her chest and face dappled. The sun set and rose, and the ants came. Because they were ants and their colonies were made of instructions, they began to take the woman apart. Her flesh pulled away in pieces, like bread. Every night the ants left her and returned to the colony to set down what they’d gathered. There were feasts. They worked through to her skull. They cleared the tissue between her ribs and crossed under them. Whether she was beautiful, it would have been impossible to say.
One afternoon, before the bones were rested, the ants found another person inside the woman, a small person bluer than she was, big-headed and waterlogged, and because the colony had no instructions for a person inside a person, they stopped. They sent a messenger and worked around their discovery as they waited for the answer to come.
It did, the same day that the child came to rest on the mother’s spine. They swarmed him. They knew he was a human child. The messenger had seen ones like him, living. They took the child apart piece by piece as they had taken apart the woman, except that this time each ant memorized what it removed, working from the outside in and then, as they built the new child of wax, from the inside out again.
They covered him each night and they finished him, finally. That year, they had no children of their own. They might have slept. They might have starved. Their wax, like their bodies, was made from what they ate, so the wax child was grit and water and ants and mother and child, and the lines in the boy’s face must have come later, because ants are as faithful as any beings. They can make only what they see.
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Credit Tatiana Marie
Jessica Roeder was born in Chicago and lives in Duluth, Minnesota. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in magazines including Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and AGNI. She is the author of the prose chapbook Staircases Will Outnumber Us (Red Bird), a forthcoming poetry chapbook, Trees Full of Walking (dancing girl), and two erasures of Moby-Dick. The recipient of two McKnight Artist Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, she teaches writing and modern dance and works as a copyeditor and proofreader for literary book publishers. You can visit her at jessicaroeder.com.
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Division of Birds will be published in Spring 2028. To see the full list of the 2026 Big Moose Prize finalists, click here.