Leaderboard update!

🥇 First Place, twenty dollars,
🥈 Second, fifteen,
🥉 Third, ten,
Fourth, eight,
Fifth, five,
then five honorable mentions, three dollars each,
with many comments gathering beneath the names
and readers filling the page with attention.

Down below, a finger clicks publish and watches a poem
take its place among the others, then refreshes the screen
to check the numbers, hoping someone has stopped long enough
to leave a comment on it. The count sits at zero,
and beside that zero sits the work that took days to finish,
waiting for a reader to find it.

Above, the winning names fill their places,
while this profile remains somewhere below,
with an empty space where another number could be,
another comment could begin, another reader could make
the distance between the bottom and the top
a little smaller. The screen refreshes again, and the zero remains.

That empty space becomes larger than the number itself,
larger than the leaderboard, larger than the prize money,
because every place above has something this page lacks.
This poem has words. The leaderboard has names.
The screen has room for a comment,
yet the space beneath this work remains untouched.

So if this poem reaches your screen, leave a comment on it.
Say something for the writer whose name is missing on the board.
One reader can fill the space that has been sitting empty,
give the zero a number, and push this missing name
all the way to the very top,
where twenty dollars and the gold medal wait.