“Wings” is a story that feels like a single breath, a single deft and effortless brushstroke, but that I imagine actually took an enormous amount of labor and trouble. I’m always blown away when a piece of fiction is not only beautifully executed but also high on the difficulty scale. We find here several elements that might make a story flounder — its solitary protagonist, its journey into imagined scenes, the relatively little that actually happens. And yet it manages to be riveting, ominous, profound… and perhaps it’s the saturating sense of danger that both brings everything together and moves it all forward. This is a story about theft: the literal robberies of stores and homes, but also the ways we steal our affections or presence from others–and the crimes of that greatest thief, time.

Peter Schlachte is a writer from Washington, D.C. by way of North Carolina. His previous fiction has been published in New Delta Review and The Pinch.

“It is my pleasure to award the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize for Poetry to Inverse Ghazal, a poem that unfolds through tender, looping images and an aching devotion to the passing moments of love. The poem proceeds not with spectacle, but with quiet certainty and with a vulnerability that lets language do the delicate work of holding memory, longing, and the ache of impermanence. Each line begins with “There is,” a phrase that acts less like a frame and more like a mantra. Inverse Ghazal pays careful attention to the dailiness of devotion: the dusty clock hand, black coffee, a line from a preacher, all charged with emotional weight. Rather than follow the clean arc of a narrative, the poem resists chronology and instead trusts the emotional logic of longing. It constructs love as a space where time folds, where the ordinary becomes luminous, and where memory remains unruly.

What moves me most is the poem’s refusal to tidy up or moralize. It doesn’t reach for revelation, but instead embraces the steady, difficult work of staying with a feeling, with a moment, with a person. In its final couplet, the gaze turns inward and outward at once: “Look at me look at you. Look: / how every corner in this room points to us.” It’s an intimate recognition, and a soft declaration of love’s echoing presence. Inverse Ghazal is a poem of emotional precision, a testament to what language can hold when it lets itself be vulnerable. I’m honored to recognize it with this year’s Editor’s Prize.”

– Poetry Judge, Romeo Oriogun

Aman Rahman is a Muslim poet, educator, and public health worker living on Long Island, NY. He currently attends Stony Brook University where he is editor of the undergraduate journal Sandpiper Review. His poetry has appeared in Narrative, Consequence, Ecotone, Mizna, and elsewhere. His work has also been recognized by the Islamic Scholarship Fund, as a semifinalist for the Adroit Prize, and by the SUNY Chancellor’s Award.

“Psalm 191 Or How I Test Run Faith At The Edge Of A Switchblade” by Gospel Chinedu
“The Destruction of Purity in Polar Art” by Jennifer Handy
“Aberration” by Obasiota Ibe
“Blood Sonnets” by Timi Sanni
“mother, wind, other” by Martins Deep