First Place – 2025 James H. Nash Contest

“The curving lines and careful ruptures of ‘Paradise Woods’ build slowly into a narrative that is fatalistic, terrifying, and all-too human. The speaker here documents the horrific killing of an animal and in doing so allows us to see the fragile line that stands between  brutality and childish experimentation. The speaker tries to delude themselves into accepting that they might be able to bend reality so that they can look away from the darkness. In the process we come to understand that looking away is also an act of horrific violence.”

Daniel Borzutzky, 2025 Nash Contest Judge

Paradise Woods

by JILL MCELDOWNEY

What ritual patterns itself in their mind—

                       the high school boys who find	     the three-legged fox
dragging itself along the backroad shoulder? Is it the vodka

that makes them stop the car
       or God?	             What makes it make sense?

       How they laugh	     at her bark of beware,
                             bare of teeth and, drag her into the woods by her hair?

I try again to be full-alive, to feel no shame
for the trees who watch
                             them douse her in gasoline,
light her on fire, turn her loose—

because isn’t it funny to see      how far she can run, how long she’ll last because
        wouldn’t it be so funny
                                   if she burned the whole thing down?

Zippo spark and slant rain, a sigh easing all around
              —the earth kicked open, and not even a scratched stone
to mark the inevitable: That bitch

                                            was going to die anyway.
There is a kind of truth

        in giving up and is it really	    giving up if you give what you have
and the universe still fucks you?

I could commit to that old faith    that everything happens for a reason.
But it’s getting harder

        to justify every burning animal as sacrifice, as earning
some mouthful of Paradise,
right? But if it is unstoppable

              I will keep promising myself that the fox survived—
       somehow    made it to the treeline alive. Alive.   I'll repeat it until I believe it.
 
I’ll take the illusion—

give

me the illusion of choice.
This is the fire I set myself
on fire.

JILL MCELDOWNEY is the author of the full length collections Otherlight (YesYes Books), winner of a North American Book Award, and ALYDAR (YesYes Books forthcoming 2026), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is the founder and editor of Madhouse Press. Her previously published work can be found in journals such as Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Muzzle, and other notable publications.