Onsite Poem Contest
Audience is often given a challenge the first evening of the event, to compete live on Saturday night.

2006 Challenge: Poem up to 10 lines, using the ‘06 slogan, “It’s not just the fish!”

2006 Onsite Poem Winner:
“Its Not Just The Fish”
by Layton Elliott
Scapoose, Oregon

“This is the best tasting fish!”, she said at the café
“How do they get it to taste this way?
It’s a little like salmon, a little like shad
A little like chicken and like beef, just a tad.”

“Where did you catch such a fish?” said she
To the fisherman who caught her beloved entrée.
“By the nuclear plant up the river a ways;
They grows some big fish, as its warmer, they say

And they come in all flavors, all sizes and vision;
It’s not just the fish - It’s the fission!”

Midnight at Coffee                                                                       
Jon Broderick

From here on the beach
Beside the creek at home
I can throw a stone to our house.
Today I squint in sunlight,
My hands less stiff, less swollen,
A smoked salmon lunch in my belly,
Hot summer sand at my feet.

No more gray mud.
No more turning my back to driven rain.
No more interminable sunsets rising from behind the foggy northern horizon.
No more khaki silt and sockeye-laden water flushing the Nushagak and scouring her
            sterile but for mud shrimp and flounders.
No more waking stiff from a snooze stolen from the tide,
            a gas can for a pillow, a buoy for an ottoman.

Today my clothes are dry and
I’ve fallen in and out of sleep while my children romp where salmon run,
Happily ignorant of whether the tide is rising or falling.
Here, too, the cutthroat hide.
We catch them with Grandpa’s jeweled lures
And let them go if we feel inclined.

But beside the tundra bluffs,
Because I wasn’t inclined,
We beat, eyes clenched against the driven spray,
To Coffee Point
At midnight, alone.
And how we hammered the fish!

Far from us our tireless wives
At last fell asleep near the trout that hide among the fallen spruce and cedars
While we rolled our net,
Plucking silver ingots from the web
Like pelagic spiders
Until the falling tide and building gale
Chased us from the mudflats
And gingerly home,
Finally home
Where the cutthroats hide
And I linger until Doreen arrives,
Five young poems in her wake,
And I know I’ve got to go fishing.

Holly Hughes Night Drift, (mp3, 1 minute)
Jon Broderick Monday in the Lower 48, (mp3, 1:50)
Harrison "Smitty" Smith, Advice, (mp3, 40 seconds)
Harrison "Smitty" Smith The Fourth Opinion (mp3, 1:12)
David Densmore, Hands (mp3 1 minute)