Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
Grapes and Questions
What is a dream without desire?
It wouldn’t be a dream at all.
Desire stirs within us the questions
that we have always asked ourselves
Questions that beget more questions
until the dream is a question itself
that keeps the wheel turning,
making us ask more questions
until we realize there isn’t an answer waiting
because there was never meant to be one
Now we must ensure our raisin doesn’t fester in the sun,
but what if we never wanted the raisin in the first place
and only yearned for its grape predecessor?
Another dream bound by its sister Desire
in a fate intertwined
and touched by its cousins Delusion and Bitterness
Awake but not conscious
More questions, less answers
Though when we receive that precious grape,
we plop it right into our mouths
to enjoy the sweetness for a moment
and believe that fruity nectar was meant for us
then wait for the next grape to come along
But what of grapes and dreams and questions?
Do we chase them until we have what is rightfully ours?
Until our thirst is quenched and hunger satiated?
Do we ignore the grape and let it become a raisin,
only for it to consume us in the end?
Questions begetting questions begetting questions
I say: keep eating grapes
Keep asking questions
Your answer is the search, the ask, the desire.
Audrey Andrade, a California native, is a Navy Veteran who has been writing creatively since she was in seventh grade. While she had a technical career in the Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer on Guided Missile Destroyers, she always found herself seeking out ways to hone her writing talents, eventually publishing in the 2025 One Page Poetry anthology. From acquiring experience in technical writing and proposal management to starting her own creative writing brand as The Weekend Poet, Audrey has found herself immersed in the writing industry with the same enthusiasm she found when she wrote her first winning poem in a middle school writing contest. She is a United States Naval Academy graduate and holds a Masters in Business Administration from Drexel University.