Coffee

Rachel Orzoff

The coffee is weak at Kips.

It has to be after sitting on the warmer plates for hours.

The pots are never empty, except at night after their swirling

with salt and a wedge of lemon.

Stains removed. Evidence gone.

Not really coffee anyway.

Bottomless cups at Denny’s.

Bitter brew made harsher with cigarettes and self important talk.

The lack of Focus as we dream up our Stunts.

Caffeine mainlined as our drug of choice.

Sometimes a dollar is all we have to get a fix.

And we’re better than these circumstances anyway.

Styrofoam cups in the Highland Park Hospital waiting rooms.

Before Styrofoam was killing the ozone. Before bad things could happen to us.

This pain isn’t ours. It belongs to old people. Other people.

Poke a hole in the Styrofoam cup. Let the real worries fall through.

Snap off the top rim in small nervous pieces. This isn’t happening to us.

It’s happening to someone else.

We’re just a lipstick stain on the white cup of cold brown liquid.

It’s not really happening anyway.

Dunkin Donuts has a drive thru.

The coffee is strong, tasty. Smells of faraway places.

They’ll sell you a large cup and you can use it to keep alert on the drive.

The drive to somewhere else. Somewhere more real. Somewhere less real.

Somewhere no one knows you. Or they know the real you.

Behind the wheel of your father’s expensive cast-off you drink your coffee and drive.

To Evanston or Rockford. To Paris or Shanghai. To Sumatra or Arabia. Or back home.

It’s just a cup of coffee anyway.

The Starbucks opens.

Coffee becomes culture. Ordering an art form.

It’s better coffee, worth the money. The kind of coffee that elevates you.

But it’s not the coffee of your youth. It’s posing.

Hiding behind soy whips and half shots.

Telling you that if you drink it you will be welcome

in the crowd of fellow coffee drinkers.

Changing the coffee shop from a place of black-clad iconoclasts

to a club with punch cards and WiFi.

And that’s not coffee anyway.