2025 Family & Home Prize FIRST PLACE WINNER: “THIS COUNTRY CALLED LIFE” By Bertha Crombet
Frontier Poetry is excited to congratulate Sean Hill’s pick for the FIRST PLACE winner of the 2025 Family & Home Prize “THIS COUNTRY CALLED LIFE“ by Bertha Crombet
Crombet’s poem captures the persistent, daily, and quiet anxiety attached to one’s elderly parents. The speaker’s mind tethers the beauty of their father—his salsa dancing, domino playing, cheerleader-dad self, his paella, the way he hands the speaker a Choco Taco every time the ice cream truck passes—to the looming fact of his mortality. The heated blur of nostalgia blends into the heated blur of fear as the speaker imagines their father not here, but leaning back in his recliner. Or on the bathroom floor.
What is so remarkable—and tender—about Crombet’s craft in this poem is the insistence on the quotidian. The very everydayness of love and fear, folded into one another, reveals the depth of the speaker’s devotion. The joy of a father-daughter relationship emerges as they grow more and more alike. Almost like twins.
Read her poem below.
THIS COUNTRY CALLED LIFE
Every time my dad doesn’t answer the phone
I’m afraid he’s dead. He just turned 90,
but there’s nothing wrong with him,
with the exception, of course,
of all the natural things: the blade of his heart
dulling, the locomotive of his brain now
hissing along slowly. But he still
dances salsa, plays dominos, drives,
spends long hours slaving over
complicated dishes in the kitchen.
Sometimes paella, his fingers stained
yellow by saffron, the black mollusks
jeweled and glinting in the pan.
For special occasions, he roasts
a whole pig in a Caja China
until the skin crackles, crisp and sharp
as the blade of a scythe.
I call him every night at 9:30.
When he doesn’t answer, I think of him
downstairs using his favorite toilet.
Or in the kitchen, nibbling on Manchego.
But sometimes, I imagine him,
breathless, in his recliner,
the evening news blaring on TV.
Or sprawled across the shower floor,
motionless, the water pooling
in the center of his chest like a tiny oasis.
I love him, although I rarely tell him.
Birthdays, mostly. He’s been a good dad—
drove me to every cheerleading practice
even though he didn’t understand the sport,
always stopped the ice cream truck
to get me a Choco Taco, pulled me
from school early even though he knew
I was faking my stomachache.
And when I got older, every time
I left the house on a Friday night,
he’d worry. Said the world was not
what it once had been. Said,
“Este pais es muy peligroso.,”—-
“This country is too dangerous!”
Panicked each time
he called and I didn’t answer.
Look at us now: twins.
Bertha Crombet
Bertha Isabel Crombet is a Cuban writer and poet by way of Miami, Florida. She received her PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University and has been published in The Florida Review, Black Warrior Review, and others. Her chapbook, Paleotempestology, was published by C&R Press in 2018. Most recently, her work has been featured in the Best New Poets anthology (2024), and it received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology (2026).
