TOFU INK ARTS PRESS 2025 POETRY AWARD WINNER

 

IN HONOR OF THEATER VISIONARY REZA ABDOH

 

After hundreds of submissions this year, it is with great love and a humble'd heart to honor Walt Trask the  Theatre Visionary Reza Abdoh fourth annual Poetry Prize for Tofu Ink Arts Press. We will publish their Chapbook in 2026. 

 

Walt Trask is a gay, emerging poet. His work has appeared in Ursa Minor, University of California Berkeley Press and in the collection The Lightness of Being, The International Library of Poetry. He lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexíco.

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Caper

 

            after Juliana Gray, Maraschino

 

 

Implies, immature bloom of capparis spinosa.

Implies, edible abiyynot bud of the Flinders rose.

Implies, goat-frolicking thievery, furtive and sly.

Nonpareils, surfines, capucines, capotes, drowning

amid lemony salted vinegar until ivory spots of rutin

crystallize across backs of army-green tadpoles, petit

bombardiers that flinch even a strong palette.

Suspended in jars they marinate patiently like phenolic

balls of formaldehyde resin, ready friends to resist the 

hardest of industrial impact.

                        

            And from the opposite side of the breakfast table, he’ll say he’s a “szouthaffrikkanjew” who dresses bagels with cream cheese first, then capers, so they adhere as well as desert coyote jaw around dog neck. The teeth can’t be seen once fixed in fur, but like pickled bombs among layers of lox and sweet onion, the tongue knows they’re there. He curates art from Joshua Tree. His pre-fab house, anemically minimalist with cold cement floors, clings to desert bedrock as the abiyynot bush does to the Western Wall with its short-lived blossom, a bleached white spider with legs skyward awaiting death. He makes it clear his salted heart, no doubt as hard and green as a green-lipped mussel, won’t be robbed by frivolous, harebrained pleasures, carefree episodes that elude a common understanding. Yet, with persuasion of Moses, he’ll aim to spark your libido. But when ‘…the grasshopper loses its spring… the caper berry has no effect.’*

 

*12:5 Holman Christian Standard Bible