No Words

In your old spot, Quiet gazes all night with its fish eye.
Sharp works an ice pick at my cold block of slow sad.

Quiet and Sharp clash like two silent feral cats
In my head, spilling onto the bed. Do I hear rain?

No rain. No thunderbolts. Nothing answers.
I drift back asleep, clutch ripples in sheets, hold no one.

And if I say “no words needed” out loud to your shadow,
Do words fall like trees in the forest?

And did I speak if no one hears them?

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Donna L. Smith grew up in the Washington, D. C. area and attended the University of Maryland.  She and her husband lived outside of Annapolis where they raised their family until retiring to Ocean Pines, Maryland. Donna started out as an English teacher and later enjoyed a long career as a learning and leadership development professional in a variety of business settings. Donna has always loved language and poetry as a way to express emotion.

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THIRD PLACE
David P. Kozinski

$25 and publication in the Bay to Ocean Journal
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Summer Girl

“With a noose she can hang from the sun
and put it out with her dark sunglasses”

- Beck Hansen

There’s a three-masted frigate on the back
of her thigh, rocking on a blinding sea,
sails blown open by fat-cheeked cherubim
that split wide the bubblegum-snapping clouds.
It’s a profiteering voyage she’s on,
righteous and season-sanctioned.
The vessel sails her skin, this walking willow,
as if she were Oceanus, while the ink
runs her to latitudes where the water
draws the moon to its embrace
and slices it into shanks and wedges,
crescents and starfishes.

Landed, she knows the way
to the close-cropped green
with its precarious cup
under star-guided nights when it doesn’t matter
if we sail until dawn and sleep it off past noon;
ship out again the next night on fresh sheets
and pillows, or out where katydid din
withers the trees and the grass feels cooler
than the breeze. She’d call Ride home, Ulysses
eyebrow raised, and I’d dock
at her backdoor, scrambling eggs
and her mind-blowing, volcanic hair.