Congratulations to Upper School teacher Amanda Rosas who was recently nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. 

Founded as a poetry magazine in 2015 by Louisiana poet, Clare L. Martin, MockingHeart Review has chosen Amanda Rosas as one of its nominees for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Sra. Rosas, as she is more widely known at Visitation, has had poetry published through this journal in years past, but this year, her poem, "Finding New Ways" was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart.

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America - including Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Read her poem below.

FINDING NEW WAYS

Funny how we repurpose things. Take this glossy brown wicker
basket in front of me. Once, it contained a flower arrangement,
spongy green Styrofoam at its stomach ambushed by bouquet. 
Condolences peering out of lilies, cerulean and white, solemn
and tearful. Sent by coworkers to your father’s funeral. Presently, 
it occupies with woven shine simple jars of popcorn. Strange how
it honored the dead, nuzzled an urn of human ash and now homes
your favorite snack. We’ve repurposed each other over the years,  
too, don’t you think? Young lovers turned old friends needling one 
another’s buttons. Separate people turned union by the blood of 
children. Your shoulders once tangled my hair, but are now so 
much more, where the death of our fathers and the ripe keloid of
pandemic fears are a canvas for our intertwining scars. Always our 
triangle chards finding new ways to carry on. Ways to bind or break 
a slight renewal more. Like paper made pulp again, we are purpose,
repurposed.