Bethesda Local Writer’s Showcase: 2026 Adult Poetry Contest

Weeding Fish Mint
By Thu Nguyen – Gaithersburg, MD
1st Place

I call you by all your names: Chinese lizard tail,
fish leaf, heart leaf, chameleon of my yard.
The man with Roman numeral tattoos tears a bit of
your fishy flesh from the bolted weedy bed as he
pretends to gag, throws a piece of you into the grass.
I hate that stuff, he says; last time he touched you
he could smell and taste you for the rest of the day
and week, and I think he’s exaggerating, but I hope
he isn’t. As I watch him continue to dig and toss
dirt and roots, I think: he’ll have to keep coming back
if he’s that careless. I hear my mother tell me
this is what you get when you hire a white gardener
to do the things you don’t want to do. He doesn’t know
where you came from, that I grew you along
the border I shared with my neighbor who never says hello,
hoping you’d spread your volatile oil so she’d have no choice
but to notice me. He doesn’t know the magic of how
you’ll haunt him: regrow rhizomes from any
segment of foliage, propagate by division. He doesn’t know
all the good you can do picked tender: how you taste
wrapped around a spring roll, how my grandmother
swears you help her with her memory. There’s so much
he doesn’t know, I might never make him understand,
not without grabbing a fistful, shoving some in his mouth,
making him eat a whole salad of fish mint and dirt,
tell him it’s ok, it’s good for him, isn’t it good?

They Say Getting Old is Not for Sissies
By Tara Prakash – Chevy Chase, MD
2nd Place

but what about the people sitting by the hospital bed, the people waiting
for the hospital bed to be delivered to the house. See, I just returned from three months
in Nepal and walking from the airport baggage claim to our car in the parking lot, I learned that my grandfather has a catheter in his penis because he hasn’t peed

in six days. And the first few days home, I was in bed with a stomach bug, bacteria I’d picked up at Kathmandu Burger or some other street food place, and my grandmother kept calling me asking to see me. “Dadi, I’m sick. I don’t want to get you sick,” I kept saying,
and she kept calling back with the same request, because she has dementia and Alzheimer’s
and how can you blame a woman with dementia and Alzheimer’s? And I’m tired of telling her the same thing again and again, but she is the one who is in a rehab center, who sleeps in the cold because they won’t turn up the heat, who thinks there are mice all over her feet and keeps asking the nurse to get the mice off her, and yesterday evening after waiting all day at my grandmother’s

home for the hospital bed to be delivered, my dad told me he sat on the kitchen carpet and cried
and he only ever cried when watching Where the Red Fern Grows, and I know getting old is not for sissies, but watching your parents get old is not for sissies either, and watching your parents watch their parents get old is not for sissies either. My point is none of it is for sissies,

and when I’m feeling better and am no longer contagious, I visit my grandmother
in her rehab center, and I sit in the chair by her bed and she is squirming and twisting her ankles underneath the thin sheets and “I’ll get the mice off of you,” I say, I keep saying. “We’ll get the mice off of you.”

bodi no be wood
By Chioma Urama – Lorton, VA
3rd Place

this bodi will break one thousand times
+ you will burn through her again
sinew to soot
soot to soil
this bodi made of wind chime
+ stardust + mud + pieces borrowed
from hands that will turn them
over again + again this
bodi make war
make good on its promise to
fade + falter + break
to chant + sing + dance +
fold
to be home in an
erring world this bodi
this delicate thing
made of water

Eldest Son
By Charlotte Clymer – Washington, D.C.
Honorable Mention

There’s a word for the eldest son in many cultures: In

Korea, it’s jangnam;

In Japan, it’s Chōnan;
In Nigeria, it’s Okpara;
In Germany, it’s erstgeborener Sohn.

Go to New Delhi and over chai, a proud Amma

May tell you about her baṛā beṭā.

In Moscow, frigid in bone and spirit, children are
Told fairytales of the antagonizing but ambitious starshiy syn,
Who often fails, only to be usurped by his kid brother.

In England and France and Spain, the firstborn son
Was once prized to save royal bloodlines and whole heads.

There is nothing so illustrious to be found In
the trailer parks of Central Texas.

I was “the man of the house” in More
bereft circumstances.

I was bubba in moments of pride.

I’d slip back into my room at night, understanding
All that was expected of me for every tomorrow to come, And

falling asleep, I’d whisper my name for myself

And hope to someday meet her.

A Letter From Gaza
By Hania Qutub – Vienna, VA
Honorable Mention

I have to tell you about how hard it is to lose
an arm a leg an eye
while being a kid in Gaza
I have to tell you about how hard it is to be
in a wheelchair in a place where
all the wheelchairs are filled with children
And all the graves are filled with small shrouds
But the hardest thing I have to tell you
is how hard it is to have
no parents no uncles no grandparents no brothers no sisters no cousins
They bombed our house.
And killed them all.
They say we are terrorists.
I have to tell you
We are the terrorized We are the starving We are the thirsty
We are shot and gassed when we try to find food and water
For 4 generations we moved from place to place
running from their bombs, prisons, fires, and guns.
I have to tell you
We have had enough and We are dying
What will you say in return?

Brush with Royalty
By Marina Ruben – Washington, D.C.
Honorable Mention

When I cracked,
The dentist gave me a temporary crown–
Wouldn’t give me a real one, for reasons not fully explained at the coronation.

Does a temporary crown make me a temporary princess?
Like Diana
Or Meghan Markle
Who shed the crowns they wore,
Like how I tore off my preschool Cinderella costume with its gasping plastic mask.

Back in the throne room,
My temporary crown popped off, as if resisting the title. The dentist re-cemented it,

But, when it fled again, we both gave up,
Accepted the impossibility I could manage that level of responsibility,
And I remembered the foil falling from my faux slippers,
Revealing my Velcroed chariots.

Accepted a future that flowed through straws,
A life spent never needing to chew
On that one, impossible side of my mouth.

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