In every landscape, there are paths that refuse to follow the design — quiet shortcuts worn by those who know a truer way through. Urban planners call them desire lines: routes we carve between where we are and where we ache to be.

For this year’s Lemonlight Prize, we seek poems that follow those inner tracks — the ones that appear when longing meets choice, when love overrides logic, when grief redraws the map. These are the paths of instinct and impulse, where our ordinary lives open into something luminous.

Whether your desire line leads through memory, wilderness, city streets, or the quiet terrain of the self, we want to read work that moves toward something true — poems that risk vulnerability and trust the body’s sense of direction.

We welcome all interpretations of Desire Lines and encourage submissions from poets of every identity and background. Let your work wander. Show us where your heart insists on going.