Walt Whitman Daydreams at the Register
Robert Frost Stands in Line Undecided
Sylvia Plath Sits at the High-Backed Booth
Frank O'Hara on the Bus from Worcester
Finding Allen Ginsburg Humbled at a Dunkin' in California
Running from America
Donald Hall at Dawn
Mystery and Solitude in a Coffee Cup
Ted Kooser Writes a Letter with His Morning Coffee
Gwendolyn Brooks Tells Henry Not Until After Her Coffee
Ross and Aimee Reunite
The Truth the Dead Poets Know
Walt Whitman Daydreams at the Register
I lean on you, the wooden counter, this stand filled with bags of beans holds us apart.
What do you want? Whom do you love? I will not assume.
There is a fragrance here, an embrace, breathe it.
I breathe the air exhaled by talkers past, the men scrolling phones unable to decide, the
youths long past the starting bell wishing for the rush of the street or subway car.
I recognize the women waiting for the feeling of health after the first sip. I watch them rising.
I hear the older men muttering in corners. Are you listening? I will not mutter here.
The line snakes through the shop, a sprawl full of nodded heads, the women’s dresses pleated, a
man scuffs the floor with his boots. A performance of waiting.
A mother ignores the child who reaches out against his harness, his face reaches with heat and
purpose.
I am that child and his mother. I am the man who holds his cap in his hands. I will be waiting.
I am not ashamed to stand against the gates. To lean here limitless in my mind, negligent and
ungovernable. Could you say the same?
I will stand here as the shop light goes out.
Robert Frost Stands in Line Undecided
When I see the straws tilting across the table
set with sugar and the thin staves of stirring sticks
I like to think someone has been arranging them for me.
But the arrangement doesn’t bend my mind the way
steam will rise from the brewer’s pot, to catch a false hand
of air like the man just arriving with his hard hat
under his arm’s wing, steel toed boots flecked with paint,
scuffed and waiting, weary of my considerations.
Soon this day will start and we will return to our working,
thoughts like broken glass, the brackish hand raising
the last dregs of a cup before the whistle blows. I am also
a dreamer, brimming with ice, stirred back to silence.
I like to think that on some other morning he will hear me,
could listen to the sway of color—there are worse things
than the burn of misunderstanding that settles now in a heap
before us in our choosing.
Sylvia Plath Sits at the high-Backed Booth
Nobody in the room, only coffee wisping above the table,
mugs on either side, though mine is cooling mostly.
Breakfast—two doughnuts, a glass of milk and a conversation
somewhere at the end. A smile picks its way through your teeth.
I feel the skin of my legs press the chair, hard and dumb.
It is barely morning. You note the great orange face reflected
in the windows across the street but your eyes look out at nothing.
Steam climbs the steep path between them. Jam oozes where we have bitten
I smell the sugared feast, twitch like bees believing the smoke that calms them
is a god to mold them, a swarm of sweetness sent to complicate me one last time.
Frank O'Hara on the Bus from Worcester
It is 8:40 in Worcester a Saturday eastbound
and the bus is stalled which left me thinking
about you and Frank O'Hara typing a poem
in the gallery. Interactive, the critics said,
Irreverent. We are two things at once.
The page jams and he cranks it back,
enjoys the new lineation, as though he’s skipping
blocks on the city’s grid with Allen waiting
across town. The horns blare still as if sound
could echo forward to an arrival. Outside the pavement
lifts another Massachusetts summer. I look past
men in orange vests placing cones through humidity,
to a boy walking down the sidewalk
with a bag of donuts, his mother holds his hand
and an iced coffee already sweating,
which reminded me of you almost collapsing
that snowy and rainy day and Frank on a beach
on Fire Island. I want to whisper against the glass.
You are never truly sick. Except I love you.
Finding Allen Ginsburg Humbled at a Dunkin' in California
My left eye aches for the weather. I do not have time for poetry tonight.
But the neon lights flicker like god or death depending on which moment we look up.
Next to the entrance is a row of men, hirsute and blitzed, whining softly to themselves. It is strange to find you here, listening, weeping quietly into your beard.
I expected to find you walking, skipping from the curb,
to observe a sunflower’s stretch through a misted lens,
to watch the laundry quiver on alley lines
to step upon cracked hypodermic jaunts, the gleam of night streets
to greet the moon reflecting in the window of an apartment floating above the neon haze
Your glasses have fogged with coffee, the night cold against the glass. I look back over my shoulder, you are still as I left you.
You are so quiet, an em dash that levels the depth of a line.
after Jericho Brown
America runs on dysfunctional demands.
It feeds on memory, the love we crave.
The love we crave feeds our memories
My father is unmoved by the sound of rain.
Words fall against my father, unmoved.
He leaves us sweetness on quiet mornings.
Quiet mornings are sweetest when he leaves us.
I divide the pastry with a knife. Eat it all.
I eat knives like pastry, divided by it all.
His love for America genuine as freedom.
Freedom is measured by genuine love.
I could never return once I left home.
I left. The feeling of home never returns.
America runs on dysfunctional demands.
heard his father waking before the birds
a voice
muttering the dark
it’s time he thought
a held breath
like a door opened to let in the pale light
there’s a white box of pastry at the table
if he came back
they would sit and share, watch the day rise
Mystery and Solitude in a Coffee Cup
after Mark Strand
The morning opens itself and makes me climb stair by stair out of sleep’s silo into the length of its long shadow where cottonwood seeds pass to settle at the door’s foot without knowing why. I enter each room waiting to root as the sun attempts to open each window. There are things to say which fill me in ways I do not comprehend, stories to be told in muffled tones. I sit until the dark well of my mug settles into the lukewarm pleasure of routine, the one we have agreed to, until the pain of continuing is nothing if not a crime.
Ted Kooser Writes a Letter with His Morning Coffee
The sun comes earlier and earlier
so I, who have weathered this last spring
wishing for sleep as the water swelled
our garden, filled the paths with small ponds
to place an earthworm there, a wriggle
to call the robin, whose shadow spreads
in a circle beneath her—the path
a valley without trees or fear—
now come here to see the faces floating
above their tables, restless and spare
in the sun, sitting with their coffee
as if to startle themselves into reflection.
Meanwhile, you are still sleeping,
the curtain covers the window like matted leaves,
so I woke still dreaming of you—the crooked
floorboard croaking, my slipper’s shuffle
echoed the hall as I looked out through
the fog still clinging to the morning grass.
I will walk home to you, soon waking,
perhaps waiting by the window, holding
the lace open to see, beyond mote and speck
and the lifted fog, what the day might bring,
so I, who only wanted to let you lay a bit longer,
will keep walking, cup in hand, looking inward.
Gwendolyn Brooks Tells Henry Not Until After Her Coffee
The boys aren’t awake yet, sprawled and spread
on their sheets while my thoughts stick like honey
or a knife out of the drawer, clean without a friend.
I sing to them. Return incomplete and hungry,
we will dine again. Wait for me in labored light,
I’ll keep my eyes, the dishes left for others.
Drag me to the waiting line, heart hurt with spite
on tired legs, morning’s shuffled order. A mother’s
stand: our home is a memory of management,
eggs deviled, children putting on clothes,
the spoon’s stir, dregs, the dreams we dreamt;
each minute packed, strives for beauty, composed.
Asleep, I have hopes for you, this day, my boys,
Sprawled as cities, folded as sheets, shining joys.
Friends, bearing their weight
carefully on roller skates
in a Dunkin’ parking lot near campus
the wheels’ chrome disco glint
sprays small circles of light
upon its white plaster walls.
They are grinning, of course,
as they jump the cracks, loosen
large weeds with each pass,
waving arms and wheeling
like dream robins. They want
to tell a story. He knows she is
probably cataloging their genus and species,
crabgrass and clover, nutsedge,
so he begins adding others:
the purslane he likes to wash
in the sink basin by the window, chewing
their fleshy leaves, Oxalis with its small cups
for yellow flowers. A dandelion’s long taproot
spreads beneath them in bold tufts until
an unweeded garden grows around
the two of them still circling, holding
hands now, their shadows stretching
across asphalt as they skate home
and she thinks about rubbing buttercups
on her chin when she was a child
how their gloss revealed whether
she and her friends loved butter, how
the skin of the plums in her garden
back home seemed ready to unburden
their fruit.
after Anne Sexton
Go, they say, from the church pews,
their stiff backs of stone, to the grave.
The dead remain alone, tired of words,
withered heat, the memory of being home.
The drive thrus are empty. At night they hold
their ears to the speaker’s squawk making orders
until the moon gutters them back toward touch,
an iron gate, their memory, in this country people die.
Fall, they say, like wind through stones,
a winter’s song, touching the sky like dirt
sifting through fingers. No one would kill for this.
We are alone with our memories, my darling.
And what would the living do? They lie,
shoes in their hands. Or walk the shore dreaming
the seas to stop. They remain, brave and unblessed,
a knucklebone to their throats.
Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses (Daily Drunk, 2021) and the forthcoming Poets of Queens Anthology (2024). His work is forthcoming at AGNI, and can also be found in the Baltimore Review, River Mouth Review, The Shore and elsewhere. He is a Poetry Editor at The Weight Journal. You can find him on his website www.jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.
