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Crossroads Contest Winners Announced!

Eastern Shore Writers Association is pleased to announce the winners of our annual Crossroads poetry & Micro-Fiction contest!  Congratulations to this year's winners!


CLICK HERE to watch the finalist reading and announcement of contest winners in its entirety, which took place on July 30th. A special thank you to the 80+ contest entrants, and to Crossroads Contest Judge, Poet Laureate of Salisbury, Maryland, Nancy Mitchell.

All three winning entries will be featured in this year's Bay to Ocean Journal, scheduled to launch in December.

2026 WINNERS

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FIRST PLACE
Jane C. Miller

$100 and publication in the Bay to Ocean Journal, and free admission to the annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference
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My Son, My Icarus
Naucreate’s Lament

The Old Masters, what did they know
of my suffering. A slave killed off
by myth, I lived to drop onto this world
what fluttered my womb as if I cocooned
butterflies, (just nerves, the midwife said),
that rubbed raw my insides as tickling can
when applied too long. And then,

how still you became. As if preparing
for what lay ahead, you slipped amniotic,
pinioned by wing into the fluid draft
of this world other hands abandoned
and cursed for me to kill. I couldn’t,
once I felt those handless arms, winged
as a tree waxing its first leaves,
their tentative, hungry unfolding.

If I tell you the wonder of the feeling
of bones and shoots dressing a body
outside itself, the feathered flailing
that lifted me into mothering, do not
tell me love is easy when its object is
to let go. There was no pencil
you could hold, no candle but one
cruel boys tried to burn you with.

No sport for you, not even soccer,
your wings raising your feet to dangle
above the fray. No direction for you,
but up. I let you sleep summers
on the roof, your body curled
into its feathers, rising fatherless
to the claiming sun, for there was
no Daedalus. The years I alone

fed your tendons, tended your
overlapping quills to bolster
your solo storking the sky
like some ancient prophesy
come to life, your wings aglow,
waving. That day, I alone
who knew you first, felt you pass
through me again as you fell.

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Jane C. Miller is the author of Canticle for Remnant Days (2024) and coauthor of Walking the Sunken Boards (2019). A winner of the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and two Delaware Division of the Arts fellowships, her work has appeared in numerous journals, including: RHINO, Colorado Review, Whale Road Review and on buses through the Luzerne County, PA Poetry in Transit program. Miller coedits the online poetry journal, ൪uartet.

www.janecmiller.com

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SECOND PLACE
Katherine Gekker 

$50 and publication in the Bay to Ocean Journal
____________________________________

New World Symphony

We’re in the dark, in the last row of telescopic seats.
Tossed on retractable chairs — instrument cases,
jackets, books. The high school auditorium
smells like a gym. My father & I are listening
to a rehearsal of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.

My father’s hand weaves in time with Dvořák
whenever he quotes “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
& “Going Home” in his symphony. That day,
I drive us on my learner’s permit, developing
a soft touch on the clutch. How not to grind gears.

***

My hands smell like vinyl. I’m listening (again)
to Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Our beagle
stretches out, her body against my thigh. She’s
sated on the last of the season’s gooseberries.
She’s learned how to slide her muzzle between thorns

as sharp as barberry, how to avoid the translucent
green fruit so bitter they make you shiver.
We’re the only home with a Stachelbeere bush.
Ripe berries as rare as astatine’s half-life of seconds.
Musical notes, played, then gone.

***

Nighttime in the Allegheny Mountains. Inside
someone’s home. Paul Winter performs “Wolf Eyes.”
I text my brother — “Dad” autocorrects to “sad.”
The moon followed us all day, pale. Supernova
dust in our bodies. Inside my right hand, particles

from one star. A different star’s powder inside
my left. A cosmic stream. A new world inside me.
Every window’s open. It’s cold. I shiver. We
hear howls, yips, hoarse barks in concert with Winter’s
saxophone. Then whole measures of silence.

____________________________________


Katherine Gekker is the author of two poetry collections: O My Charmer and In Search of Warm Breathing Things. Her poems have appeared in many journals. She served as Poetry Assistant Editor for Delmarva Review. Composers Eric Ewazen and Carson Cooman have set collections of Gekker’s poems to music. Gekker was born in Washington, DC. She founded a commercial printing company in 1974 and sold it 31 years later.

_____________

THIRD PLACE
Mel Edden

$25 and publication in the Bay to Ocean Journal
____________________________________

Qualm-free, Menopausal Poet Vacuums in Bra and Knickers
One Afternoon in the Peak of a Maryland Summer

August, Beelzebub’s bitch, struts her sweaty crutch,
douses the day with relentless roasting, and I’m feeling it.

But carpets won’t clean themselves. I drag Hoover up thirteen stairs
to boudoir, unravel dusty cord, so plug makes love to outlet.

With chocolate-box hormones, who knows what assortment I’ll get?
Today feels like I’ve scoffed the whole damn lot. I’m hot.

I strip off. Kick off socks, shake down shorts, peel away
damp-cloth top, expose nude bra and pink knickers.

I hoover nude. Not rude nude. Not crude nude. Just godforsaken
menopausal nude. Ceiling-fan-smooths-inferno-skin-nude.

Teenage daughter arrives home, doesn’t bat an eye —
Hey mom, good day? She’s the sweetest peach in the bowl!

And I’m the pear. Yesterday decadent, today torrid decay.

____________________________________


Mel Edden is a British poet based in Maryland and a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems feature in Gargoyle,The Loch Raven Review, Welter, Slant, Washington Writers Publishing House, and elsewhere. Mel directs Manor Mill poetry events in Monkton, MD and edits their anthology Poets of Manor Mill. She is currently working towards her first solo collection. More information at www.meledden.com.

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ABOUT THIS YEAR'S JUDGE
Nancy Mitchell, Salisbury Poet Laureate

Nancy Mitchell is the author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut, and The Out-of-Body Shop, and co-editor of Plume Interviews I. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in such journals as Agni, Green Mountains Review, Ploughshares, and Washington Square Review. She has taught in the English and Environmental Studies Departments at Salisbury University, Maryland, and is an Associate Editor for Plume Poetry Journal. She hosts the Zoom Reading Series Poets on the Plaza and serves as the Poet Laureate of the City of Salisbury, Maryland.

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