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.

Tweet #NYcityverse

A promise seen in the Hello Deli,
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

— Wyman Meers (@Why_Man52) April 18, 2018

Quarter Water
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

— Evan Venegas (@evanvenegas) April 18, 2018

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
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?”

— Kirsten Lambertsen (@MsPseudolus) April 13, 2018

In Downtown Jersey City
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

— Regina Tinti (@regina_tinti) April 19, 2018

Gourmet deli
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

— Sally Benner (@SallyBenner) April 13, 2018

Dinner at 2:14am

This beefpatty is trouble.
More trouble. Still is.
Wait, maybe not any—
nopetrouble.
hohgod.#NYcityverse

— Cooper B. Wilhelm (@CooperWilhelm) April 16, 2018

#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

My favorite cat
Sprawled across the newspapers
Greeting all who come#nycityverse

— Thomas Beard Trocco (@TomTrocco) April 13, 2018

#NYCityVerse #bodega #wnyc #nyc
Searching
Finding
Pulling
Hard
Cold
Wet
Cerveza

— Tiny D (@TinyDBurlesque) April 18, 2018

Bodega

Miss. Miss!
How many sugars?

Oh. No. None.
I’m sweet enough.#NYcityverse

— Jenna Cardinale (@jennacardinale) April 13, 2018

It’s 40 degrees and I’m Salty thirsty
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

— debra benjamin 🍯 (@clackgrouse) April 16, 2018

on the border
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

— Virginia Mallon (@meallain_o) April 13, 2018