Tonight's Poet Corner: You Drank Coffee

You Drank Coffee
by Belinda Roddie

There was something extraordinarily green
about your eyes, tingling olives suspended in a
murky martini wonderland, and you used those
pristine fruits to glower at me behind the table of
gossip, laced with intoxicating vocabulary, hand-tossed
words on Caesar, with the "Et tu?" echoing -
and I could not blame you for that.

You drank coffee, smoky Joe's
café brunch special, but at ten o'clock at
night - breathing fumes of fields, the
laborers dancing on your tongue. You didn't
care about verbal stimuli, the forked back and
forth innuendo of debate served greasy on a
bed of balsamic vinaigrette, the emulsion of
black pepper on rye. You were made uneasy by my
smile, and I could not
blame you for that.

Now, we became two, instead of
one - the cellular mitosis of conflicting
regimens, the siamese becoming fraternal
fast, the nucleus bubbling into red lava lamp
floaters in the sinister line of vision held above a
bottle of cheap Merlot. You were not willing to
swallow me whole, and I was not able to
season my soul enough to boost anyone's
appetite. The crust was left uneaten, the
wheat unwisely sabotaged by too much garlic. We
finished dinner without so much as a
"Thank you," and the waiter, unyielding,
held out a hand for an extra Abraham Lincoln,
an Honest Abe who could tell me no tall tale. The
damn server would not blink for me, holding that
stare above my purse as it shed the threads of
nostalgic patio behavior,

and I
could not
blame him
for that.