Stanzas: Monthly Chapbooks September 2014: The First | Page 19

It was dark, and you were dark, and we drank dark coffee
ground from a dark bean grown in a dark place. But the mug was
star white, and your lipstick pressed so soft against the ceramic it
left a little print, a little bit of you. Dying. Stuck to a mug. Some
poor bastard’s mug. Some sorry fellow’s lifetime of effort. Some
worthless piece of kitsch. It didn’t even hold the heat very well.
Never drink your coffee cold. That’s what you told me. Or did
I tell you?
So we were heart-hardened and sorry-faced and it was windy
or wet or cold or something miserable and horrible and crazy
when we entered swift-footed and sure: the coffeehouse.
Still small, still cramped in that homely way with tidbits here and
trinkets there like you’d just stumbled upon someone’s kitchen.
Maybe grandma is there baking pie and waiting to pinch your
cheek and ask you all about the lovely girl on your arm and won’t
you just have one small cup of coffee, sure isn’t it bitter out.
Bitter.
So god-damn bitter here.
We sat and chit-chatted small-talk to the kindly owner and
bobbed our heads to the existential music contemplating nihilism.
You kissed your mug and the lipstick stuck and it rained and it
rained and it rained. We had more, we indulged and pondered the
nature of rain, debated providence and divinity and you told me
all about that one time you were at your mother’s house in the
countryside and you potted.
You potted.
Flowers and herbs and shrubbery, things like that. We sat
there being rained on, sipping away at our youth in a cramped,
dilapidated coffeehouse while a perverted imp of a man overcharged us for his barely-heated bitter, black crap, and you
discussed the various way to pot plants.
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