Adult Contest Winners

OPA Fall 2020 Contest Results in the Poet’s Choice Category “To all the poets who submitted to Poet’s Choice: it was a deep pleasure to read your work. It is the nature of contests that only a very few can be recognized, and I regret the disappointment felt by the many – having often experienced […]

Congratulations to all the winning poets and poems in the 2020 Fall Contest, and thank you to each contestant who entered! The poetry was lovely! Fall Contest Chairperson – Susan Morse OPA Fall 2020 Contest Results: Poet’s Choice: Pepper Trail, judge First Place: “Rise on Up” – Mark Hammerschick Second Place: “Temenos” – Alicia Byrne

Baby, It’s Cold Outside (a Vivianne sonnet variation) Barbara Blanks As embryos we each explore the wall of womb that holds us. It’s the first place joy is felt—mom’s heartbeat like a lullaby.   Cocooned in touch, that’s how we interact. We’re chastised just as soon as we can crawl or walk. Just look! Hands off!

Arachnidæa: Line Drawings Stephen Pollock I. Extravagance at dawn  — your finest threads are strung with pearls and you, a brooch with a clasp. Magnify the shiny spheres to divine that each conceals a miniature, an image of struggling wings, of life undone. Pass at the critical angle, and they flash and snap in the

Mind Gloss David Hedges Mind in its purest play is like some bat That beats about in caverns all alone, Contriving by a kind of senseless wit Not to conclude against a wall of stone. —Richard Wilbur, from “Mind” Mind in its purest play is like some bat That magically connects with knuckleballs. No matter

Judged by Lynn Otto 1st Honorable Mention: “Missing” by Suzanne Sigafoos, Portland, OR 2nd Honorable Mention: “Women’s Day at Sauna” by Michelle Williams, Portland, OR 3rd Honorable Mention: “Facing Backward on the Train” by Dan Kaufman, Central Point, OR Thank you to all who submitted poems. Reading them while practicing social distancing to prevent the

Cradling Dad Cathy Cain I hooked up to the galaxy of the centrifuge my milky platelets swirling like stars like swifts into the chimney of night I held the dream of him the rhythm of his breath how he loved the Milky Way how he needed the stars     then the swift dark wind those stars

Framing Don Kunz        You build a world from fragments: A row of decaying Brownstones, An empty street in the morning rain, A mud-spattered, much-battered tailgate. You can’t zoom out enough to frame: That half-acre Banyan tree in Lahaina, That treaty site at Medicine Lodge Creek, That macaque colony reclining on Gibraltar. You focus on

Dawn Donuts Dan Kaufman I didn’t figure my universe then as donut shaped, a single surface torus, iced. Predawn, I’d slip the grip of her Berkeley bed for Petaluma in my postal blues, two donuts waxy-sacked beside me as I drove the arc of an exitless bridge, my fingers licked innocent, obeying what I couldn’t

Judged by Andrea Hollander 1st Honorable Mention: “South Africa: A Refugee from Lithuania Reflects on Her New Life” by Vivienne Popperl 2nd Honorable Mention: “Cold Comfort” by Carol Boutard 3rd Honorable Mention: “The House of Winter in Summer” by James R Merrill