"Roaster Finds a Ring"
by by Nicolas Butler
1st Place
In the steel drum spinning like a prayer-wheel
It tumbles like a stray stone - invisible amid the bounty of beans,
a pebble of hail inside a brown blizzard
A nothing-noise.
Until the beans spill into the patient pan
and the smoke dissipates like a magician's diversion
and the roaster's hand running through the beans as a five-fingered rake
finds the ring.
There are always surprises inside the burlap.
Mysteries hatched when the beans turn green to brown.
Bullet-casings from bygone wars and nails from burned-out villages
there are twigs and there are stones too.
Mementos from around the world
but now he holds some woman's wedding ring.
There are crude hearts engraved in the hot silver
and a name once etched, now smoothed away by the invisible oil of her skin.
Her fingers sorting beans some world away
moving with the speed of a harpist
counting secret abacuses.
Enrique, Enrique, Enriqu, E ri u...
The ring goes to the roaster's wife
who dangles it from a leather cord knotted at her pale throat,
the ring too small for even her delicate fingers.
The ring goes on making strange echoes in the roastery
that the roaster counts like sad prayers,
runaway lullabies whispered to lost lovers.
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"Roman Masters"
by Kirk Summers
2nd Place
"Arms and the man, I sing" - I wonder,
Coffee, as I muse with the old poets
in my morning chair,
how headlong one rushes in medias res
and the walls of lofty Rome do surge,
without you?
Would Turnus have groaned so,
as his soul flew unremorseful to the shades,
and Aeneas marked by piety
felt such rage,
without you?
No, those vatic Roman masters did not know you,
Coffee, and I wonder how.
Could Lesbia's swollen eyes
have cried such bitter, mournful tears
when Catullus' sparrow met his end,
without you?
Even Lucretius, smearing hone on his cups,
poured the bitter absinthe
of atoms, of unobservant gods,
for unsuspecting boys,
without you!
Still Horace quips, and rightly so,
that no poem lives long
which a water-drinker pens.
How is it then that every sacred song
he sang, he sang
without you?
Ah! I get it, Ovid, the ever-changing shapes,
the morphing unforeseen turns of life.
Coffee, were you not his Muse,
did he learn this
without you?
What bitter grounds did you
imbibe, Juvenal, that turned your
words to spears? Or "I must write
satires," would you say, "but, Coffee,
I can do this
without you"?
Yes, Coffee, the old Roman poets
needed nothing of you
to raise their immortal strains;
Yet I wonder how this is so, when
without you,
I cannot read them.
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"Jackfruit"
by Hazel de Los Reyes
3rd Place
Old Maximina would be flummoxed.
The distant peals of mischief
prodding at her work would have
her crows digging in,
and ginger root knuckles
reaching for the stick.
In the rot of summer, breathing
the perfumed sweat of jackfruit
and soursop sheltered beneath
untamed tamarinds peppered
here and there by leaves,
leaves of something growing
bulbous and breathless falling
on festering humus,
I marvelled at her labours.
Old Maximina would have cried
waving her hands gnarled by years
of sculpting unruly trunks
that bear fruit within easy grasp
of children who leave nothing
but seeds spoiled or spewed.
These days she will
not find me perched
on an outstretched branch
hiding among arboreal misfits
pelleting her ripe liberica.
I no longer pluck precious
ripe coffee fruit to sling.
Still her crows will have curled
stiffer catching me breathless
deep in green-blue pearls,
wonders unseen even in the
orgiastic otherworld of her backyard,
my own whorled hands fondling
beans grown by another, my tongue
licking the stains of jackfruit.
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"For Chickory, With Love and Squalor"
by Nicolas Butler
4th Place
She powdered her nose with the sugar of four beignets
And in the heat of the flooded city
The sewage raw beneath our feet and burning our eyes
We ate pastries and smoked cigarettes like disciples of Tom Waits,
Strung out on thick coffee full of roots and spices.
The coffee in this dead city, this blooshot city, this down-on-its-luck city is black.
The coffee in this dead city, this ten-count, TKO city, punchdrunk palooka city is black.
No creamer tonight
But hold your sugar shaker high and let the sweet crystals rain down
Into these muddy waters like good snow in a place without snow.
Let the sugar rain down like salt, let the sugar rain down like salt
The coffee here drives zombies from shallow graves
And lures junkies into the sunlight like recovering vampires
The coffee here melts teeth and scours urns and intestines alike
And beneath the undying sweet yellow light of this happy-sad cafe we sit like
Guilty lovers
Eating away and waiting for dawn and filling our ashtray to mark the time of our indulgences.
New Orleans! New Orleans! New Orleans!
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