I Entered a Baking Contest With a Poem
I misread the flyer; the judges ate my metaphors politely.
The flyer said, "Show us what you made with your own two hands," and I took that personally.
It was pinned to the noticeboard by the lift in my building, printed on yellow paper, announcing the housing society's Annual Creations Contest: Sunday, eleven a.m., community hall, entries welcome from all residents, judging by a distinguished panel, prizes to be won. There was a border of little cupcakes around the edge, which I took to be decoration. This is the part of the story where you are allowed to feel smarter than me. Everyone else does.
Because here is the thing: I had just finished a poem, and when you have just finished a poem you are not a reliable interpreter of documents.
The poem was called "Sourdough." Fourteen lines about my grandmother's kitchen. Her hands folding the dough over itself like she was tucking something in for the night. The flour that lived permanently in the crease of her wedding ring, so that even her hand on your forehead when you were sick smelled faintly of bread. She had been gone two years and I had finally written toward her instead of around her, and I was carrying those fourteen lines through my week the way you carry a full cup down a staircase.
Show us what you made with your own two hands. I read that sentence... and my whole chest said: yes.
I got the poem laminated. I want to be honest about the lamination, because it is the detail people refuse to believe, but the shop was right there next to the photocopier man, and it cost almost nothing, and some animal part of me knew the poem was going somewhere and should be waterproof. I mounted it on a small wooden recipe stand I found at home. It looked, if I am kind to myself, like a menu. It looked, if I am accurate, like a menu.
Sunday. Eleven a.m. I walked into the community hall and into a wall of vanilla.
Trestle tables ran the length of the room, and on them: sponge cakes, tea cakes, a chocolate thing with a mirror glaze you could fix your collar in, coconut barfi arranged in a mandala, and one three-tier pistachio tower that clearly considered itself the main event. Aunties circled with cling film and strategy. Somewhere a child was crying about frosting.
It was, unambiguously, magnificently, a baking contest.
I stood in the doorway holding a laminated poem on a recipe stand, and I would like to report that I turned around. I did not.
I had ironed a shirt for this.
At the registration table, Mrs. Colaço looked at my entry, then at me, then back at the entry, with the expression of a woman whose clipboard had not prepared her for this timeline.
"Category?" she said, finally.
"Poetry."
A long pause... Somewhere in the hall, a mixer whirred.
"We have sponge," she said carefully. "We have tea cakes. We have traditional."
"It's about bread," I offered.
She looked left. She looked right... Then she wrote OTHER on a card in firm capital letters, and assigned me table fourteen, and in that moment I loved her more than I have loved several people I have dated.
Table fourteen sat between a lemon drizzle cake and the pistachio tower. The lemon drizzle belonged to a girl of about twelve who asked me, with genuine kindness, where my cake was. "This is instead of a cake," I said, and she nodded slowly, the way you nod at someone on a bus. The pistachio tower belonged to Mrs. Lobo, decorated champion of three previous years, who leaned over, assessed my entry for threat level, and said, "What is it, gluten-free?"
"It's paper," I said.
"These days, everything," she said darkly, and returned to her tower.
The judges came through at noon. Three of them, with spoons and scoresheets: a caterer, a bank manager's wife, and Mr. Almeida, a retired schoolteacher whom I knew faintly from the lift. They tasted the lemon drizzle. They tasted the tower and made the low humming sound that in this country signals structural approval. Then they arrived at table fourteen... and stopped the way traffic stops.
The caterer picked up her spoon and put it down again, defeated by the format. But Mr. Almeida picked up the poem. And because he was a schoolteacher, and schoolteachers cannot hold a text without projecting, he read it aloud.
The mixers went quiet. I am not saying the whole hall listened. I am saying the tables nearest us did, which in a room fighting over cake is a standing ovation.
He read the line about the flour in the crease of the wedding ring, and the bank manager's wife took off her glasses, wiped them on her dupatta, and said, to nobody in particular, "My mother measured salt in her palm. Never a spoon in forty years. Her palm."
Nobody scored anything for a while.
I stood in a tent of strangers and cake, holding fourteen laminated lines about my dead grandmother, and I have never felt less ridiculous in my life.
I did not win.
I want to be clear about that, because this is not that kind of story. The pistachio tower took first, deservedly; Mrs. Lobo accepted her certificate like a head of state. My scoresheet, which I keep to this day, is a document of pure human diplomacy. Taste: left blank. Texture: left blank. Presentation: seven out of ten, with a comment in the caterer's handwriting that I intend to have engraved on something eventually: "Good lamination."
But at the end, during the prizes, Mr. Almeida stood up, cleared his teacher's throat, and announced that the panel had created, by unanimous vote, a special one-time award: Best Entry We Could Not Eat. The prize was a wooden mixing spoon, presumably from someone's kitchen drawer, presented with full ceremony while the hall applauded and the lemon drizzle girl cheered for me specifically, which nearly finished me off.
And then the actual turn... the one I did not see coming. Mrs. Lobo, three-time champion, tower undefeated, came to table fourteen while I was packing up. She stood there a moment with a box of pistachio barfi in her hands.
"My grandmother had those hands," she said. "The ring. All of it." She pushed the box at me. "Give me the poem. For my stall at the Saturday market. People should read something while they wait."
We traded like it was the oldest currency in the world, because it is.
The poem hangs in her stall now, laminated, next to the price list, and every few weeks she sends me a photo of it dusted white, because flour goes everywhere and spares nothing, and the lamination, I must insist one final time, was the right call. Strangers read my grandmother's kitchen while they wait for change. Some of them, Mrs. Lobo reports, read it twice. One woman photographed it and cried, and then bought extra barfi, which Mrs. Lobo considers the poem paying rent.
Since then I have learned to check flyers for cupcake borders, and I have started entering a monthly poetry contest instead, where the judges arrive prepared for paper and nobody asks if it is gluten-free. I lose there too, mostly. Losing in the correct category turns out to be its own quiet promotion. I also found a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I read it like a class photo, because I would bet my wooden spoon that every single one of them has a table fourteen somewhere in their past. That is what we are, before anyone knows us: the wrong entry at the right table, refusing to go home.
These days I write toward memory on purpose, with the spoon hanging above my desk where other people keep degrees.
And when people ask what it is, I tell them the truth.
It is the only prize I have ever won for poetry, and the poem it honors is hanging in a market stall under a slow snowfall of flour, getting whiter every week, rising.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.