Winner of the 2025 Winter Craft Poetry Prize
Christmas
Tayler Koppenaal
My stepmother and I look up at the clouds as my father swings
the sledgehammer down,
beats the wedge until the log splits. She says, this is what
I hate about winter, this ugly gray. I watch a woodpecker
hang from the feeder,
unbothered by the wind. My father throws wood
into the fireplace, crumbles paper, strikes a match.
Smoke crawls
up the chipped bricks as the fire licks and hisses. He tries
to control the flames slithering out but slams the glass doors
with a huff. My ears are ringing
when he turns on Fox News, his eyes trained on their latest claim.
He leans closer to the television as he wraps lights
between the tree branches then
turns away and hurls a string of curses at the window.
The host sputters excess into our ears, but I can’t stop thinking
about how the pond is not yet
frozen over. The roads refuse snow. Believe it or not,
the Earth does get hot sometimes, he says while bending branches
on the Christmas tree.
Tayler Koppenaal is a graduate of Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri, and an emerging writer. Publications include The Avalon Literary Review, The Meadowlark Review, and The October Hill Magazine. She plans to pursue an MFA in the future.
Analysis by Ben Cooper
How can a poem make us feel, understand, or emotionally connect with ideas as far-reaching as what Tayler Koppenaal looks to talk about in her gorgeous piece “Christmas”? When dealing with such abstract concepts as love, family, global warming, or the interaction between violence and grace, it would be tempting to leave these ideas as they are—to simply state the abstract and expect the audience to pick up your philosophical slack. Koppenaal, of course, doesn’t get anywhere close to falling victim to such an easy way out; she utilizes image, form, and line breaks to move her audience through these macrocosmic ideas on the microcosmic level, thereby allowing us to understand them in a more intimate way.
It’s no accident that we start the poem looking up at the clouds as they move through the sky while the poetic voice’s father—grounded, focused, working—splits logs in the yard. Koppenaal means to make us care about the things that are—like the sky—beyond our reach, and she achieves this by creating a sort of dichotomous relationship between the grounded and the abstract. Each and every abstract idea is communicated through image—a social critique of news cycles becomes a ringing in the poet’s ears, an ever-present fear of irreversible climate damage becomes a pond not yet frozen over, and the complex relationship between parent and child becomes the bending branch of a Christmas tree. This obvious mission to make sense of the world solely through images makes these broad concepts understandable and impactful in a way they might not otherwise be.
You can even see the movement from macro- to micro-cosmic focus in the syntax of the poem. Set in tercets, each stanza contains a short line surrounded by two longer lines. Within Koppenaal’s short lines, we get visceral images of everyday life, from a sledgehammer to fireplace smoke to the branches on a tree. In the longer lines, Koppenaal presents her audience with some of her more complicated connective material, showing us characters wanting change, hating winter, or justifying global crisis. In this way, the short lines might serve to represent the tangible world we can understand, and the long lines could become the broad social difficulties the poem looks to make sense of. This, in many ways, mirrors the characters in the poem and by extension the audience themselves—each of us small cogs in a series of machines that work and extend far beyond our control. We only begin to see this, however, because Koppenaal has such a deep command of her craft that it makes the movement from the abstract to the intimate feel natural, palpable, and emotional.