Poetry Challenge: Showing Your Bodega Some Poetry-Month Love
It's Week Two of WNYC's poetry challenges, in honor of National Poetry Month. The prompt: Send us your best original poem about a bodega.
Read some listener submissions below, and get ready to submit your poems for your final challenge of the month: Write an original poem about spring.
Use the hashtag #NYcityverse to submit your entry.
A promise seen in the Hello Deli,
— Wyman Meers (@Why_Man52) April 18, 2018
his smile a sunflower,
and not even the salad bar sneeze guard
could protect my heart from beating
haphazardly.
I yearned for him from behind the wasabi peas,
adorned in a bodega’s dusty shroud;
forsaken before I could say hello.#NYcityverse
Quarter Water
— Evan Venegas (@evanvenegas) April 18, 2018
Not my daughter
Times of joy, I have broken many foil
Synthetic, harmful. turmoil.
Bright purple, color so sweet
Her favorite color, she won’t have this treat.
Quarter Water
A tall order.@WNYC #NYCityVerse #bodega
Bonafide. You have chips. Yummy. You have drinks. Yummy. You have sandwiches. Yummy. You are so good. Bonafide. #nycityverse written by Theo Guidotti 7 years old about our local “bodega”
— Ted Guidotti (@papiguidotti) April 20, 2018
#nycityverse
— Kirsten Lambertsen (@MsPseudolus) April 13, 2018
Knowing our first kiss was near, we swaggered through the snug aisles to the back fridge full of beer.
Full of ourselves and our glittering city around us, we smiled at each other when the gentle cashier asked, “Are you two famous?”
In Downtown Jersey City
— Regina Tinti (@regina_tinti) April 19, 2018
bodega ghosts wander the streets and then
congregate in the corners of real estate offices & gourmet shops
village elders
one & all
standing guard
and whispering the neighborhood’s oral history
heard & seen only by those who know to seek them#NYCityverse
Gourmet deli
— Sally Benner (@SallyBenner) April 13, 2018
It is not.
Feline kingdom
It is so.
Convex mirrors
Distort me.
Corner cameras
Follow me.
Playtex shelved beside pickles
Because it's
The letter
P.#NYCityVerse @WNYC #bodega
Dinner at 2:14am
— Cooper B. Wilhelm (@CooperWilhelm) April 16, 2018
This beefpatty is trouble.
More trouble. Still is.
Wait, maybe not any—
nopetrouble.
hohgod.#NYcityverse
#NYcityverse with just enough crumpled dollars in sweaty socks to buy cold cuts and an Arizona/you jump off your bike/trip on that one tiled step/wave to the family behind the counter/they've owned the place forever/wait/step up to the counter/where the register's older than you
— Jen F. (@flippedpancake) April 17, 2018
@WNYC #NYcityverse pic.twitter.com/stBhk7qEPU
— Jonathan Lee (@ramenjon) April 17, 2018
Bodega Cat Haiku
— Thomas Beard Trocco (@TomTrocco) April 13, 2018
My favorite cat
Sprawled across the newspapers
Greeting all who come#nycityverse
#NYCityVerse #bodega #wnyc #nyc
— Tiny D (@TinyDBurlesque) April 18, 2018
Searching
Finding
Pulling
Hard
Cold
Wet
Cerveza
Bodega
— Jenna Cardinale (@jennacardinale) April 13, 2018
Miss. Miss!
How many sugars?
Oh. No. None.
I’m sweet enough.#NYcityverse
It’s 40 degrees and I’m Salty thirsty
— debra benjamin 🍯 (@clackgrouse) April 16, 2018
Down two flights
There are those full cold small rectangles
Flavor nodules on the tongue
And I pretend that Andy’s son rings up my Campbell’s tomato juice.#nycityverse @wnyc #nationalpoetrymonth
on the border
— Virginia Mallon (@meallain_o) April 13, 2018
of kings and queens
we would buy time,
bamboo and beer
from the bodega.
in the distance
the cantibel
of a city bound el
the future as bright
as dancing under streetlights #NPRPoetry #NYCityverse
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