2025 Molly Aviva Brodak Award for Bravery in Poetics
2025 Award Winner: Frankie Tran
Glass Orchid is thrilled to announce the recipient of the 2025 Molly Aviva Brodak Award for Bravery in Poetics, a prize awarded to an artist of distinctively independent vision and approach.
This year’s winner is Frankie Tran, the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma Press, 2018) and creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, and identity. Frankie will receive a $10,000 no-strings-attached grant to recognize and support their work.
The inaugural recipient of the Molly Aviva Brodak Award was selected by the Glass Orchid executive board in collaboration with an expert advisory panel consisting of Juliet Escoria, Lily Hoang, Janice Lee, and Richard Chiem.
A Few Poems from Frankie Tran
1/7/24
It is possible to be lovesick in one’s own dreams.
We went searching for sea turtles but instead saw how the hurricane had damaged the coral reefs.
Many new year resolutions are predictable, the overemphasis on self-improvement, how we should do this more or do that less, all of us lighting candles in the darkest corners of our homes.
When I was a child, I didn’t dream of becoming a person who would have a job when I grew up.
I made up answers to questions I didn’t ask for.
At recess one day, I went higher than usual on the tire swing, and nothing felt the same after that.
My vision was cleared.
Math class seemed futile.
We spent the evening cutting landscapes out of magazines.
There is anticipation at the beginning of the sentence, but the meaning isn’t the point.
I want the happy fact of honey.
There are not enough boring smells.
I find myself saying nothing new.
Just another way of boiling down the juice again.
1/14/24
a correspondence of the present
our capacity to see shifts with the light
stars have gigantic processes
of spirit, of soul, the heavens
an image keeps coming back to me
one I’ve seen in a painting
rapid movements of the eye
comprehending a poem
gestures toward listening
everything we touch
touches everything
we find infinity
so easily
ecologies of each other
we echo the mirror itself
rearranging ourselves onto maps
holding onto scraps of time
A MOTION, A CREATURE, SOMETHING IN AIR
Pollution no longer shocks the headlines.
Texture no longer endures.
An unfamiliar question stuck under the tongue.
A name for every branch, feather, volcano, border, reward, or desire.
Language dashes across the mind, immense, uneven, arrogant clouds.
To be an ant is to have a tireless profession.
When language self-immolates, we languish in the coals.
The labor of guarding versus being on guard.
Oxygen is an affinity.
Without closure, when does the beginning begin to overflow into a middle?
Failure is preachy.
Dirt refuses to contain or maintain a border.
The more sensitive the light, it exposes even us.
Every seam has its own emergence, but not every seam has something to show off.
Minor chords motivate the progression toward a center.
The attic was a glimpse of a devotional galaxy.
Salmon slip out of a flood, a standard account of refusal.
What can a dose of rainbow not repair?
There is a poem glaring from beneath the rubble.
The orientation of home is no longer defined by a river.
We were held temporarily by pottery.
The public became a fog, a facade of reversals.
As if the crisis must be defined.
We mimicked the mess of illegibility.
A motion, a creature, something in air.
What stains a random decision has no advice.
Sermons exist, war prisoners exist, the state and its lice exist.
Now onto the work of a true excavation.
We were promised infusions of perspective in the near future.
Instead of writing: turn sugar into paint.
Instead of writing: rub a stick of butter into a blank book until its pages slip away like stars.
Fumbling for a buoy and a mind reader, approximations of describing pain.
The motor became a murmur.
Useless mirrors, footnotes of a mosaic.
We have tidied the overflowing lawn where the gradient puzzle spilled.
An ancient question mark pressed into stone.
Water does not always leave behind such sharp corners.
A quince insists on rotting, becoming a forgotten, nectary gash.
The sharp fact of an afternoon.
The candle seems unlikely to turn on.
Ironing casts a fog.
The future is itchy.
Marbling thoughts interrupt sleep.
An egg in each corner of the room.
A magnetic longing, the space of expression, a path leading to sound.
Forming an urgent whir, producing an opening in doubt.
A motion, a creature, something in air.
The question endures like a door hinge creaking.
Our tiredness reminds us of our bodies.
Labor anticipates a general concern for approval.
When disconnection occurs, we can’t detect the logic of disintegration.
If what decays does not come back as flowers, we won’t have anything to water.
A “fistful” is one measurement of inconsistency.
We had to go fishing to learn patience.
It was a weight on the mind, nails hammered to a thread.
The ocean keeps no calendar.
What difference does an image make that words can’t?
Stretch a second hand so more light can pass through.
The mind is a scavenger.
To “unearth” is not to undo the earth.