2025 Frontier OPEN Finalists Part One: John Carpentier, Vuong Pham, and S Asher Sund
In “ice cream for the apostles,” the poet elevates a simple post-church ritual into a sacred act through meticulous imagery and pacing. The tone oscillates between quiet devotion and understated yearning, transforming the ordinary into something like sacrament. “Pulau Bidong” employs sharp contrasts and vivid textures to evoke a landscape marked by loss and memory. The tone is both haunting and lyrical, with varied line breaks that disrupt and propel the rhythm, reflecting the fractured nature of the speaker’s journey. In “MADE IN AMERICA,” the poet critiques nationalism and consumerism with precision and irony. Sparse yet sharp imagery gives the symbols a hard edge, and the tone is lean and urgent, exposing the contradictions at the heart of American identity.
Across these three poems, we journey from the deeply personal to the expansively political, from ritual sweetness to storm-lit memory to flags torn by wind. Yet, the connective thread is presence: each poet invites us into moments of grief, devotion, fugitivity, and longing. Through their craft, they illuminate how our own worlds flicker between what is held and what is lost, urging us to look closer and listen deeper.
ice cream for the apostles
at the one 31 Flavors that served Tin Roof Sundae, sugar free
the door with the bell, a please, a thank you, a five dollar bill
the two pink plastic spoons placed beside the blood sugar monitor
i would eat and he would let the ice cream melt by millimeters.
every Sunday, he sat like a kind dog at the front door about to open
until some sign would tell him the time was right, the melt was right
and he would slowly draw the small bowl of the spoon in concentric circles
as thoughtfully as a quill through white ink speckled with chocolate chips.
i could never understand his belief, the crucifix and the altar,
but this ritual, stoic and cold and sweet, seemed to kiss the realm of religion
and i would catalogue it as closely as an old anthropologist,
bright and full for a moment of quiet understanding,
all the learnings fathers and sons say in every way but words.
even now, when all of him is gone but the stories,
i can’t ask for a scoop or sample without the reverence of an altar boy.
i ask for the communion: two scoops of coffee in a sugar cone
the freezer fog spirals like incense smoke from the swinging thurible
and i cup my two hands to receive the cone and pink spoon,
as holy to me as the wafer and the wine.
Pulau Bidong
Mountain”, Gavin Yuan Gao’s “Myth, or Luck as a Swan Boat”, and Peter Boyle’s “Enfolded in
At Pulau Bidong bay, I see a storm brewing.
Lightning flashes repeatedly like scythe glints
that illumine the ghosts of my parents wading neck-deep
through mangroves, linking limbs, breathing in
their own shadows. By the tide’s edge, they pass
through waters rubbled with the drowned.
I see a calloused cliff that holds memory of my birth
by the quarrelling waves. I felt them in the void
my ancestors as a squid. But my eyes coined into light
scattering molecules where the jungle overtook the refugee
memorial. I imagine Dead Man’s Fingers resurrected
in its chasms. A generation ago, flame trees were the wicks
seen through shanty panes. But this place holds no more room
for candles burning the night-dead bay. Silent witnesses,
the strangler figs, have overtaken abandoned structures.
From these walls I cannot decipher my genealogy,
even under the graffiti of lightning, rumbling its rebellion
of departure. Willows soaked in laments adrift
between barren rocks for years. The boat I was born in
has turned into shards of forgotten shells, where oblivion-
tides rushed in to erase them, and steal their counsel.
Comes a time when my parents are more than lotus
ponds in the spirit-infested jungle. Comes a time
when sand dunes that have held it together,
will fall into nightmares of shattered villages,
with each step of escape, exiled our mother tongue
from the vanishing river mouth. Comes a time for
lightning illuminated in the conch shell’s spirit
as if it was a temple bell chiming the tide’s music,
gonging its longing to live. And a passage
like faces innocent as children, amid sky’s cold arson.
MADE IN AMERICA
recycling bins—and after the spike in Taiwan-made American
flags and Vietnam-made American flag t-shirts and Mexican-
made American car flags and car flagpoles and Bangladesh-made
Made in America pendants, you find yourself on the coast
lacquering on the 30 SPF, patting your hair down over that bald
spot, and pulling your shorts up to your belly button, over that
embarrassing albino bulge. Kite-flying looks like fun. You turn to
the lover or spouse you remember once loving and say, “I think
it’s the sound I like best.” You mean that one American flag kite
hovering there in its holding pattern of rippling rage. How quickly
it turns. How quickly, almost sadly, it kamikazes for the sand. To
throw its erratic shadows everywhere. As if tethered to nothing.
Francis Carpentier is a graduate of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Creative Poetry Writing Program at New York University. His poetry has been featured in several community arts forums including those presented by KQED, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, GLIDE, Cutting Ball Theater, and the De Young Museum. He loves especially to write about San Francisco, his hometown, a focal point for both great beauty, and great inequality. You can find his work in Ghost City Press, Eunoia Review and upcoming in The Main Street Rag.
Vuong Pham’s poetry explores themes of displacement and cultural identity. One of his poems, ‘Mother’ is studied as a prescribed text in the NSW HSC English syllabus (2019—2025). His honours include the SCWC Poetry Prize (2025); Local Word Poetry Prize (2025); ACU Poetry Prize (2024); Shinhaiku Contest (2024); Newcastle Poetry Prize (2023); Free Expression Haiku Competition (2013); and Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Poetry Prize (2013). He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poetry, ‘Reborn’. Read more on his website at: https://vuongphampoetry.wordpress.com
S Asher Sund‘s fiction and poetry have been published in Narrative Magazine, Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, Juked, Willow Springs, and Briar Cliff Review, among many others. A few years back, he won the Marjorie J. Wilson Award, judged by Joyce Carol Oates, for his prose poem, “12 Steps of a Tradeshow Junkie.” He also creates and produces a variety of projects, including music, films, and spoken word pieces.
