Bethesda Local Writer’s Showcase: 2025 Adult Poetry Contest

Adult Poetry Contest – 1st Place

North of the Accents
By John Whelan – Columbia, Maryland

Adult Poetry Contest – 2nd Place

This year
By John Heath – Washington, D.C.

Skeletons on suburban lawns
never used to scare me. Sometimes you would spot them
lounging in Adirondack chairs with rakish hats,
leering at passersby. Rigged with live wires
their jaws chattered inanely, their eyes winked, and their arms waved.
Sometimes they raised Martinis to putative lips never
meant for kissing. But this year the skeletons
are ten-feet tall, not seated but crouching,
ready to pounce. Spiders the size of dinner plates
scuttle up their legs and bats feather silently
by sightless eyes, for this is
the Year of the Drone, so many lives taken in so many
forgotten corners. One moment a child is hugging a doll in the dust,
seconds away from the fond ministration of that
eye in the sky, whose purpose is to ensure
that the unexpected lilt of a smile in the rubble
should be recast as a rictus.

—October 31, 2024

Adult Poetry Contest – 3rd Place

Taking the Late Train
By Chelsea McGlynn – Walkersville, Maryland

Tired men with handmade signs block the trains from leaving
Aguas Calientes. Stuck, we scramble through the ruins
of Machu Picchu again, take the waters at the hot springs again,

sip our café con leches and ask our waitress ¿Quien?
and ¿Por que? She answers us: Agua. All our water is worth
fighting for. Before the train tracks were laid, your own

two legs were the only way to travel here, and still today,
there are no roads to Aguas Calientes. We could walk back
to Cusco on the Inca trail— those steps cut out of sheer cliffs,

only as wide as a llama’s haunches— and touch the same stones
that the last Incan emperor walked before Pizarro sentenced him
to death. The Catholic priest that took his final confession asked

Emperor Atahualpa if he was baptized, which translated to
“bathed in the sacred waters”. Yes, yes, he said, all our water is sacred.
So they strangled him, instead of burning, in respect of his final,

Catholic wishes. We do not walk home on the Inca trail,
merely wait at the bar for the police with submachine guns to clear
the train tracks and tell the bartenders making our Pisco Sours

Please, hold the ice.

Adult Poetry Contest – Honorable Mention

Water Over Stones
By Carol Jennings – Washington, D.C.

1

The Navajo guide offers me a stone from Canyon de Chelly. I hesitate,
consider its weight in my luggage, consider how much my ancestors took
from his ancestors, consider the weight of his own story – forced to leave
home for a boarding school where children were struck for speaking their
native language. Then I accept his gift, lightly, in the way it is offered.

2

In the creek of my childhood, water over stones was my favorite season –
not March snow-fed waters that could overflow banks, nor the August
rivulets that ran between hot, dry stones. It was the shallow waters in
early summer that urged me to come close to stones shining wet, small
fish darting above, sometimes my own reflected shadow. I thought
I held the future in my hand as it cupped those waters. I didn’t, but
water over stones is a music that runs through me still.

3

I bend to pick up a stone at the edge of a lake, summer setting of a younger
self in love. Its reddish curve fits my palm, smooth against skin. I stroke it
like a memory not to be let go, like a vision of myself in an earlier life, like
a dream that does not end upon waking. These waters can be rough with
waves like ocean surf, cause boats to capsize, people to drown. I could
keep this stone to hold in times of dark or loss. Instead, I give it back
to the lake.

Adult Poetry Contest – Honorable Mention

The Long Way
By Thu Nguyen – Gaithersburg, Maryland

There are days for shortcuts and then there are the others:
taking the back of my knife to lemongrass, bruising better
for the flavor, peeling ginger skin with a spoon,
frying and tasting, stirring and tasting,
looking for the gold, still tasting.

The kitchen steams like the fog so thick
this morning I could barely make anything out
but if anything makes sense,
it’s that flowers are unavoidable the week of your death;
die on the 13th of the second month of the year,
and you guarantee yourself bouquets,
a beautiful altar for as long as you’re remembered.

I take my cues from you: never interested in fame,
and never in a rush. I set your place while I wait
for finally the curry almost the color of mangos,
smells warm and ripe like they do in summer.

But it’s not mango season,
your favorite season, so I make this offering
knowing how much it lacks; I’ve cooked
all morning for you the long way,
like a prayer, like penance.

Adult Poetry Contest – Honorable Mention

The Gardener
By Dylan Tran – Washington, D.C.

The sun sets, and I find myself tending
to an abandoned garden, its rusted fence
a crown, its subjects long buried.

And groups of flies take turns
kissing the edges of my ears, once
for every person who’s forgotten me.

Weeds grab at my ankles like memory;
leave my life’s footprints in the tough soil;
I wonder how a soul can be like a garden.

Traveling pollen tickles the back
of my ungloved hands. Aphids make
homes in the undersides of stones;

I displace them anyway, my shovel
digging into bone, dirt flying.

For more information on the Local Writer’s Showcase, please visit https://www.bethesda.org/bethesda/localwriters