2026 Hurt & Healing Prize SECOND PLACE WINNER: “Sometime After Your Suicide, I Find You in the Apocalypse” by Edison Angelbello
Frontier Poetry is excited to congratulate Gbenga Adesina’s pick for the SECOND PLACE winner of the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize “Sometime After Your Suicide, I Find You in the Apocalypse” by Edison Angelbello
What’s incredible about Angelbello’s work in this poem is its worldbuilding: the creation of a post-apocalyptic landscape where dust, emptiness, and sunless days collapse the boundary between the living and the newly risen dead. Yet the true beauty of the poem lies in how the apocalypse becomes merely a backdrop for the speaker’s tender, precise longing and regret. It’s a reminder of the lengths a grieving mind will go to—scaling the ruins of the world, tearing through what remains—to fashion even the smallest impossibility: the chance for one final conversation with someone lost, after everything else has disappeared.
Enjoy his poem below.
Sometime After Your Suicide, I Find You in the Apocalypse
The mouths are all closed or are no longer
mouths. Miles and miles of tree-dust and star-branches,
and I could be wrong but I think this fog
is from when everyone all at once whispered home
all breath-like into Earth’s last moment, into this place
where once the air and space between our words lived.
Pharaoh here and sparrow there. The walls of the British Museum
are what we can only call dust—particles
new in that they have never not once been
so small. Dust, meet this world-looking thing, where no one knows
if we are never born or overgrown or evergreen,
always being born, how nothingness has no memory, wakes up
amused at its reflection every sunless day.
Have even our words died? The dead rise.
The dead rise to meet the end, hoping in the holes
dotting the friable tissue of space-time they will find somebody
was right—one of the somebodies who said one time that the end
of any end is necessarily the beginning because logic
or because god(s) or because when the opposite of sun
rises on the inverse of all these faces, we will step through
the rattling pavement and see what’s on the other side,
we will do anything but die. The dead, even the dead
will not die. They rise and clutch the grief-grass we’ve grown
over their heads. They do pull-ups in our doorways
and hang two more units of blood. They watch
doctor shows in our living room, and we don’t cower
in the corner. These very couches will all be gone soon,
so we ask the dead for a place in the grass
and the dead ask for cigarettes and someone
to tell them everything, everything is real as the dirt,
before they go on keeping warm in this last orange night
where living and dead hesitate in the tiny expanse
of the red forever and drink directly from the maple trees
and kiss the glorious subway seats and don’t think
about what they’ve done. This is where I find you,
tapping a tree, making a movie, saving the dogs
with very few people in our lives. To the rest,
we speak only a number of substitutions for hello
and goodbye. We can either say the truth or something like
howyadoing. To you, I wish I’d said more.
Edison Angelbello
Edison Angelbello is a poet from Fort Lauderdale, FL. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and teaches creative writing at UNC Charlotte. He earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University, where he was selected as the Lucie Brock-Broido Undergraduate Teaching Fellow. His poetry has been published in The Writer's Foundry Review, Atlantis, Cathexis Northwest Press, and elsewhere.
