A poem "with cautious, slightly energy-sapped enjambments" recreates a bar's atmosphere and patrons. Carmine Starnino reflects on the inspiration for the poem and his own  writing process in "Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings."

NEXT DOOR CAFÉ

We were bored, so we stayed. The days knocked deep

into other days. A glacialness set in, and life kept pace

with the dried fruit in the jar. Brushed steel gave back

our pissed-off bits, our doubled selves so drained of disguise

we forgot where it was we were hoping to go, holed up

all summer in a corner so dark you’d half expect bison

chalked on a cave-face every time we cadged a light.

It was the kind of place where morning fell for everyone

but harder for some, where bad decisions were lived

counter-clockwise, and endlessly refitted to finish up flush,

where afternoons were a gradual squander of sobriety,

shot glasses lamped with whisky on cue and empties

were the crags of a quandary drunkenness clung to.

Tables where, outside the shrieking reach of the talkers,

can’t-sleeps stayed and night-shifters cooled heels

attended by soul-tools: cellphone, lighter, cigarette.

Nights of middle-aged men enduring middle-aged men

in their cups, buying rounds, half-cusped on high stools.

Sun-up found a few run aground, upshouldered hulls,

while our own lives were an endless keel-scrape where

the pluperfect errand was the errand always deferred.

A kind of time travel, I guess. We sat back and watched

the future screen its clichés of us: those besuited

and briefcased, with their died-and-gone-to-heaven whistle

when handed a pint; those done-to-a-turn divorcees

in duffle coat and boots (wine-sipping casualties of the wife wars);

those who, smashed, stand too suddenly slewing into you,

and those who, if you join, you join uninvited.

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