Winning Words: Ode to the Bajan Blackbirds

 

BARBADOS' FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY celebrations come and gone and nobody ain’t say yuh cat, yuh dog, ’bout we. Sometimes yuh have to wonder if we is Bajan, too. Gabby had to tell Jack dat the beach belong to he, but it is time that we tell we story.  These fields and skies ’bout here belong to we!  We father get we here. We mother hatch we here. And here belongs to we. 

Winning Words: Taming Dragons in a Soup Bowl

 

A bunch of surfer dudes,
sun-bleached blonde and sun-browned,
inch their way across the rocky shore,
Soup Bowl bound,
tentative as firewalkers
treading unshod on red coals.

Then, with jaws firmly set,
breasts pressed to boards,
these knights of the sea
paddle fearlessly forward, 
to face the fabled dragon waves,
whose lair is the Soup Bowl. 

Winning Words: Home

 

When he comes  
He waits patiently by the door. 
He knocks softly. 
Gently.
He asks,
May I come in? 
Are you at home? 
Is now a good time? 

Mapping Barbados' LitScape

MAPPING BARBADOS’ LITSCAPE is an ArtsEtc project to track and document Barbados’ very rich and diverse literary tradition.  At our house, the need to better connect readers to this landscape and region has taken many forms over the years.
  

WINNING WORDS: PEEZOFF IS DEAD (EXCERPT)

“Best eulogy I ever heard,” I heard over and again as I mingled with mourners at the entrance to the church. His family was excessive in their praise. “Excellent eulogy, you knew him so well,” sad faces repeatedly said. “Better than even some of his family,” a few added. Only Curtis Brown, one of our old schoolmates, said, “I almost didn’t recognize the character you were speaking about. That wasn’t the Peezoff that I knew.”

*

WINNING WORDS: Magnifying Glass

 

Barbados
Barbados

Spherical axis tilting 
Blue-green smears 
      One second
Pinpoint  →  United States of America

WINNING WORDS: To the Audubon Society

 

Put shit in your eye, right so
I’d like to stuff ’em;
sate my gypsy gullet. 
But bird’s brains are featherweight,
better plied as dusters to 
chase the dint of memory from Ma’s whatnots. 

They’re all right, when not dungin’ in your eye,
on 
cool shirts, parked cars freshly polished.

I like them, then.

Raise my lazy periscope eyes, 
dingy camo binocs,
toward the wayward sky.

"Occasional Writer" Wins 2016 Carolle Bourne Award

 

MARTIN M. BOYCE, a self-styled occasional writer, is the winner of The Carolle Bourne Award for Literary Innovation for 2016.

Boyce won with “Thin Line Between,” a piece that meshes (or mashes) poetry and prose, Standard English with Nation Language, Barbadian culture seemingly with every culture—challenging them all along the way.