Our panel of judges described Marij's work as following: 
“In these poems we feel the pulse of a strong and emerging talent. Candid, surprising and original, Marij Bernart’s lines impel you to the next one with an energy that excites and always entertains. ‘There is something in the air demanding change.’ … Marij Bernart's poems struck me immediately—they have a humour and a lightness that only emphasises the seriousness of their focus and construction. I read her poem 'How to share an orange (I love you)' with a genuine pleasure, relishing the softness of the language, the playfulness, and the echoes of Frank O'Hara. Sweetness is a deceptively difficult tone to strike, and perhaps for that reason quite rarely found in the wild; in this poem, it rings true.”

​How to share an Orange (I love you)
I peel them slowly, while talking
The orange, clementine, tangerine, mandarin
is an afterthought
My thumb slowly pries it open
Now that it’s spring, the skin comes off in one easy swoop
Weeks before - it was a cold january - bits of orange peel would get stuck under my nail
The fragrant remains reminded me of you all day

I always separate the pieces into quarters first
and I count to make sure:
even number of those bright little half moons means I can make a wish
I wish you well

Silently I hand them over
(I never offer less than two)
and take a bite of my own
​Here is some sunlight,
Here is some sweetness,
Here is an orange (I love you)

Below is Tess' excellent submission, a time-traversing experience of UCC and the complexities of familial relationships:

Unmoored memories of campus

Here’s a boy: tearing down the long corridors of the Kane, giggling then gasping from exertion. He 
finds shelter behind a half opened door, tucked away from searching eyes. But as I pass his hideout, 
I can hear his asthmatic wheezes. He won’t stay hidden for long.
             I know what he did, of course, and who he’s running from. He messed with the beast’s food. Beeping and whirring and blinking in the dark, the beast needs its cards to think. Lined up in particular order by undergraduate hands, they are pre-packaged dinners waiting to be devoured. It’s Saturday (for the supervisor) and his day with the kids (while mum makes a dash to get her hair fixed) but he needs something so he’s come into the office. The girls are old enough to do what they want with the weekend, so it’s just the two boys. The small blond one is quiet anyway, but this one—the one I’ve found in the hallway—is trouble like my middle sister. He poked his nose into a room more lightless than a cave and saw its glimmering trays, its cards neatly stacked in particular order, and seized an opportunity. A deck left unshuffled is a foul thing—he’s spent enough rainy-days playing 45 to know. So, heedless of the horror, he did some rearranging. Now here he is failing to catch his breath, his exit from that computer room pursued not by a beast but by something worse: his father, frustrated and furious.
             I keep walking, I know he’ll survive. For him it’s the nineteen-seventies. Years yet before he’ll meet my mother, more still before he’ll meet me. But today, for him, he met the thing that will bind him to this university for four years, and then tie him to a desk for forty more. He is only a child. I keep walking. Up the stairs, out the door and
             plunge into this moment in January. There are two ways to the Rest from here: pass by the Cummins building, or bypass it and head straight for the door. I’m hungry and in a hurry, I take the long way around. Surface ninety-seven years back to buy myself time, when the events carved on a
plaque outside the Elec-Eng Building are happening now down at Gaol Cross. A shot rings out, sharp like the backfire of an engine, and a man best described as my great-granduncle-in-law (although he’s not the one who married in) plummets to the ground. Dead days before the truce. The shape of him gleams out of the stone, water run into the rivulets catching the glare. Tears in rain. One moment I can see it, the next the whole surface is lit up and I’m not sure which name is his. Up north near my eldest sister’s new house, his brother’s is set into the side of a pub. Worn with honour, they don’t know he married the wrong sister. Or that he, mad with jealousy and traumatic stress, chased the right one out of the county with her lover. Stole her sister and her state and brought another beast to the family, lurking in the shadows of tipsy conversation, or in the misty mounds of north Cork on the seventh day of Christmas, when Dad brought us to see the family plot. 
             We passed the old farmhouse on the way. Down the hill from the cemetery, not ours
anymore, not for many years. Dad’s grandmother sold it when her husband died, left the war and the
land behind, and moved into College Road. Then Grandad won his scholarship and traded lines of seeds from lines of code, built a thinking room and sealed my father’s fate. Fed like one of those
cards into the Machine. Now here I am. 
             I don’t recognise the face as it comes towards me. I never do nowadays, though I’ve known it for twenty of twenty-one years. It’s only once we’ve passed, once he’s returned my confused look, that I see the ghost of the kid he used to be. My cousin, the emerging energy engineer (fancy meeting him here, outside the engineering building) dressed for a funeral and unrecognisable. Neither of us stop to talk. We’ll text on our birthday, maybe, but the days of cutting cakes together are over. It’s as if somewhere along the way we switched. He’s not some fair-haired kid fresh off the soccer pitch anymore. He’s all dark and brooding and I’m the blond coming from the gym, bleached out and faded. A photograph consumed by time.
             But Time splits its husk when I enter the Rest, or rather, it opens its maw; lets me see what’s
digesting inside. Spoon soup into a shallow bowl, take a piece of soda bread, line up, and all the while I can hear his laugh from upstairs. My dad: no longer a skinny kid playing hide-and-seek in the Kane, but twenty-something in nineteen-eighty-something, rolling a die, dividing a deck, crashing a car into the door of the bar. Understand: my dad is no drunk; no gambler, no dosser either. Those dice belong to a gold-greedy dragon, the deck still to a game of 45, and the car to a family legend I could not recount if I tried. The details slip away, the past always wet and floundering when you want a good grip. But images like these float back: a rowdy game, a raucous laugh, he cuts the cards.
             ‘Card please.’ Ding! Say thank you. Move on. Hesitate.
             I always eat downstairs. Won’t venture up to the abandoned pizza place where the bar used
to be. What if I did today? What if I went up and went back and sat myself down at a round table full of elec-eng and comp-sci kids. His comitatus. Would I fit in, loyal retainer to his tormented lord? I wouldn’t. Not this shy slip of a thing with a Brontë book under my arm. I don’t read half enough sci-fi for that. But it might be worth it, to see him hesitate, see him recognise the jaw, the nose, the faulty hip and think for a minute they’ve put a new mirror in here. Maybe he’d deal me in. When did they close that bar? We’ve always had New Bar, the old one just implied. Remember first year? Surrounded by fresh faces and me, so proud to tell them there used to be a pub above the Rest. So proud to have so many ghosts to wade through everywhere I went. The air is thick with them here, thank God I didn’t get Dad’s lungs. My sister did, not as bad as Dad, but––
             But why always Dad? I wolf down my lunch, torn between two lives and think about my own. It’s not called New Bar anymore: they changed the name last summer. Another fish floundering to the sea, erased before I even leave and I’m not sure I’ll have someone to send swimming back up the Lee in search of knowledge.
             I’m late for class.
             My mother is there, when I come gasping into the Boole, dismissing tears with tight blinks as she looks at the carcass on her desk. Unattended for five minutes and someone pilfered all the prescribed pages, left the spine, face and back to sag without their organs. Always books with her. Split her leaving cert ones with her brother, an unfair timeshare, seventy-thirty to him. Thirty years from now she’ll hoard tome upon tome under her desk, scribble her name down the sides in secret code. She told me she knows who did it. She won’t give a name. If I could get it from her, I could avenge her, I could tear that thief to shreds. Arrive here five minutes earlier, while they were looming over the volume, eyes glinting, fingers twitching, ready to claw out the life-blood of those vital chapters. I can’t wind back time. I sit beside her and look. She is thirty-something and so different but I still don’t know how to fix it. Someone hurts her and the façade splinters, letting liquid gold to patch up the cracks. Her spine will straighten in compensations and it’s a good thing too because I get dazzled by her vulnerability. Sit tharn in headlights and don’t know what to do. And all the time new fissures appear. I take her hand. She disappears.
             A double exposed image takes her place. My eldest sister: at eighteen, at twenty-eight,
sitting in the same seat in the same lecture-hall. She did this module too, I shouldn’t be surprised to see her here, but we seldom speak about her degree. Seldom speak. I want to speak now but won’t. I can’t whisper anymore, too good a student now, fear if I tried I’d find my throat all clogged and auric. Not like she’d respond anyway. Too old and busy for her youngest sister when I was five; same old story now that I’m twenty-one. But at twenty-eight, she talked me through her thesis and at fifteen I nodded along, not knowing a thing. Swam over my head, like this lecture wriggling in one ear out the other. My word-processor stares back at me. Blank. White. Blinking cursor announcing that I’ve been left behind. What was that about being a good student? In my scramble to catch up I lose sight of her. Turn to tell her something and she’s gone. Like my mother. Gone. Like Rosamund Pike. Empty space. Funny how one feels the lack of a body. Funny how one blends into another. Here’s my mother: measuring breaths in an effort not to cry, meditation tactics that, from one moment to the next, morph into my sister marking time in huffs. And then I am alone, and rising alone, and leaving this lecture alone.
             Never alone on this goddamned campus. Outside a stream of students: past and present, push me towards the Boole—the other one, the library. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under here, connecting one Boole to the other? It’s one building really but they cut it off from itself. I cut across the current. It’s confused, not quite sure where it wants me to go. The centre churns where some of the student-body move against the mainstream. Fast flying mackerel, you have to dodge them like bullets, or wind up with your name engraved in stone. Among them I see one I know.
             ‘Mum!’ I cry out, reach out, brush cashmere wispy wool with my fingertips. ‘You who were with me at breakfast—’ But she does not turn around. I do not see her face.
             What year is it for her? Which degree? I couldn’t count the gold-filled lines, the stream carrying her off and depositing me at the doors of the library. 
             Blink and I have climbed three flights of stairs to sit among the trees and stare at a laptop screen. Look up to see my sister—the other one, the middle one— across the table. Funny how one feels the presence of another body in the extension of a breath. My not-twin, my mainframe; we share the same brain, and I, a mere hard-drive leaching from the side. The year ahead of me, two years, a year behind and slipping, slipping away and
             always here. He always parks here, after work and offers a lift. Oscar-mike since eighteen-hundred, now waiting in position on Connaught Avenue. The metal of his Mazda throws dying sun into our eyes and, blinded, we climb into the back, slam the doors in practised tandem, slide seat-belts into clasps. My dad; tearing up College Road, whisked far and fast from the centre of theuniverse, from the unmoored memories of campus.

Below is Luke's excellent entry to the scholarship competition, highly evocative and a wonderful blend of modernity and mythology:

Glade
It is always night here, though it is not dark. Moonlight playfully winds itself around my pine tree enclosure, lingers on the leaves a moment before continuing down to dance across the lake. Upon reaching the island in the middle, it falters a moment; a titan willow tree resides there, and its shade is impenetrable. Undaunted, the lunar glimmers dart past the island until they hit the cliff that juts from the depths. With nowhere else to go they revert to a slow waltz on the water. The trees atop the cliff are different to the ones down here, snowcapped – evil – and I know that winter lies just beyond them, that I’ll freeze when I go out there and die face down in the snow, alone   
             I am not there. I am here. I am walking along the misshapen pebbles barefoot, but not one has harmed me; they are familiar with my step, only slightly removed from water’s edge. Soon I will reach the face of the crescent cliff, at the point where it makes landfall. I might run my hand along it, feel its ridges, listen to the stories they tell and form a new interpretation. I might look upwards to the top without stepping back for a better view. I might carve my name into its body with a sharp rock. I might slump down against it and rest.
             Afterwards I walk back the way I came. A campfire that never goes out awaits me. Still, I toss it a redundant twig. It is lapped up gratefully, and I feel warmer for it. In return I ask for a light, and with an inviting crackle the fire answers: be careful, but go ahead. I steal a cigarette from its family in their cardboard home and offer it tentatively to the flame. Within moments it is smoking, and I yank back before my friend gets greedy.
             Excusing myself, I relocate to a spot nearby, where a fir tree has fallen and found that the afterlife amounts to being used as a lakeview seat. Sympathy does not come to me, for there is no wind in this place, nor loggers. Crickets flash between the waterside reeds and then settle, taking up places in the orchestra. They are all vocalists, but their rhythmic song is well-practiced. My cigarette recedes, and my lungs fill. An ugly thing in a beautiful place, maybe, but the glint at its end matches Ares’ red above. 
             His many sparkling followers are content in their usual formations until I, vainly, attempt to rearrange them into groups with new meaning. Simple geometric shapes are all I can muster. A square here, a hexagon there. The Greeks were masters of this; I am but a Roman. The constellations reform in the lake’s reflection, insulted. The crickets are kind enough not to chide me as I rise and head for the cold woods.
 
I don’t know if I’ll make it back – today hasn’t been kind to me. Branches reach out and prod and poke and draw beads of blood that freeze instantly, they’re trying to topple me, to trip me up and keep me here forever, my arm’s numb and blackened by frostbite and it sways uselessly at my side as I stumble towards that place
             The threshold heals all. Try as they might, malevolent arms cannot pierce it. Sensation creeps up my arm and repopulates the rest of me. Pinprick rubies melt warmly back into my skin. The air here is delicious and abundant, so I feast. I can breathe. I can walk. A good thing, too; I am to play a local squirrel in a game of chess, and the tree he calls home is at the far end of the glade. It is unlikely that he has other appointments, but a late arrival might hurt his feelings. I kick off my snow-covered shoes and begin my stroll. 
             This time my soles parley with soft grass. Blades buckle without resistance, gently enveloping my feet before reluctant partings. My regular haunts approach and pass, cheerfully regarding me; there is a grin in the cliff’s recesses, a waved greeting in the campfire’s flickering flames. The fallen fir is curiously absent. It is not like things here to change. I worry that I was too harsh on it. 
The god of war blazes still, surrounded by troops as if preparing to set off on a campaign. I feel compelled to light a cigarette in tribute as I walk. Ever full, Selene illuminates my path once more. I cannot help but wonder why she stays. There are surely more interesting sights to light. To this mortal the glade is refuge, special; I do not know what a heavenly body sees in it. In me. Under her divine eye my smoking offering to Ares feels a foolish thing, almost heretical. I heed her counsel and fling it aside before continuing on. 
             The chess table stands proudly in the shadow of an even prouder redwood. It is sized to my proportions rather than a squirrel’s. This seems fair; when we play marbles I am forced to sit awkwardly on the floor. One stool, all that is needed, faces towards the board and the lake behind. The other side of the table features an overhang, and this is where the creature perches, blinking at me expectantly.
             I take a seat. We cannot exchange words, but we do not need to. The animal gesticulates excitedly at the table and pieces, intricately whittled wonders of wood. To him these pawns are Colossi of Rhodes, the king a Zeus in miniature, rehomed to a chequered Mausoleum. I have an unhappy idea of where he gathered the materials. The squirrel wastes no time in opening, and I respond with a Sicilian defence. 
 
Upon my defeat at the hands of a promoted pawn I bid my companion goodnight and trudge down towards the lake’s edge. I do not like envy. I want to sleep. The willow tree on the island will be my cradle; its leaves are soft, and bunched thickly enough to hold a man. 
             Wading into the warm water is refreshing, and I know I will be dry as soon as I re-emerge. I sink deeper with each venture forwards, my connection to the sludge below tenuous. Before long only my head remains above the surface, in this realm. It is tempting to abandon my foothold entirely. 
             But the moon needs eyes to observe her beauty, and the fire hands to feed it sticks, and the squirrel a mind to match its moves. The lakebed slopes upwards.
             My footsteps leave no mark as I march towards the tree, each imprint quickly replaced by the rush of wet sand. Poseidon attempts to follow me but is halted by a bulwark of Gaia’s making, knotted roots anchoring the great willow. I hoist myself over them. Passing under the tree’s enormous canopy is stepping into a world within a world, one in which a strange nature has taken hold, despite the darkness.
             Aberrant fireflies of teal, violet, and neon red hover lazily about, lending me their glow in absence of Selene’s watchful light. The fernlike foliage here moves about with near human personality, shying away to let me pass and organizing itself into cliquish cohorts. Friendlier than most, a motile vine offers up a leatherbound Odyssey that I had thought misplaced. I wave it away, not ungratefully. I do not feel like reading tonight. 
             The trunk, many times wider than me, is like the cliff face in its weathered surface. The ridges here are less storyteller and more foothold handhold, although climbing is itself a type of story. Before scaling I must reckon with the Cerberus of the tree. They are curled up at the base, wagging their tail, surrounded by plunders: a murderous branch, a link of rusted chain, one of my ragged boots. I scratch the fearsome beast’s heads as they beam at me. It is hardly a toll at all. When they lose sight of me in the tangle of leaves above they will howl until their voices give out. I dig one hand into a crevice in the bark and begin my ascent. 
 
The summit greets me with the smell of singed life. The moon is not within arm’s length, as it should be at this height, but distant in the horizon, devoid of its light in a blue sky. This isn’t typical. Her fiery brother has arrived as replacement, and he’s in good company, joined by a legion infernal rampaging across the glade. They are remaking this place in their own image. Which came first? The heat drains from my body but the leaves are smoking, burning, and this isn’t meant to happen because it’s always night in the glade and the moon’s always there and it’s a temperate summer night not a bitter winter morning and I’m safe here
             Weakened by Helios’ cruel gaze my platform collapses from under me. Falling is a relief. My skin was made to be scraped by tree claws and they slow my descent. Selene has ruined me with a caring suggestion and gone. 
             I am caught by a huddle of restless ferns, and conveyed carefully to ground. The tree will protect us for the time being, but its umbrella lets through a drizzle of ash. The hound of Hades ambles towards me, oblivious to the heat death of the universe, followed by a troop of frenzied fireflies, no doubt anxious for their livelihoods in a diurnal ecosystem. I cannot allay their concerns. 
             Hell has sprung from the glade. Across the lake the border trees are ablaze, burned down to their skeletons and soon to dust. The organs of the magnanimous terrain, the grass, the stones, the venerable cliff, have been buried under a snowlike soot that piles ever higher. Some fight it; the campfire, for one, shrinks and then roars back up in retaliation against the traitor flames, refusing to join them in their destruction. A tiny figure attempts desperately to douse his burning masterwork with water from a tinier bucket. At the edge of the lake, now frozen over, crickets chirp their funeral dirge like the last players on a sinking ship. Once the sun’s doom is accomplished, a nuclear winter will envelop this place. 
             Smoke burns my lungs, and I’m less inclined to enjoy it than before. The willow weeps molten tears. This is the death of a paradise. I’m to blame. I won’t feel the soft grass under my feet ever again and everything here will die and nobody’s going to know the difference. They’ll find this Pompeii and that stupid fucking cig stub and chalk it up to a freak accident, clear it all for land development and erect an office block on my corpse
            But far away from here, beyond the rising smoke, Selene’s waiting. For me. The denizens around me are waiting, too. They’ve been sequestered away too long. It doesn’t have to be cold forever. I will take a torch of campfire flame to keep me warm, a jar of colourful fireflies to light the way, and if any tree reaches an arm towards me I’ll take its hand in my own and shake. The cigarettes can stay – they were designed to burn. 
             I’ll lead my triad hound out of this place – no, they’ll lead me – and tear the squirrel from his burning creations. We’ll walk out of here, and the flames will part to let us pass. I’ll bring a bag of living ferns, a willow seed, a handful of soil, and one day, when the ash has settled, I will create an open glade for all the world to see, an earthen exhibit of my own design. Forget the ancients and their bland marble; I’ll infuse it with myself instead. With memories of fallen firs and stubborn stars. 
             So I step out onto the lake, and the ice holds firm beneath my feet.