COFFEE
Margaret Heltzel | Dawn To Dusk 2019
A lonely cup of stale coffee
Rushed exit, no time for goodbye
Left, right, left, right into the sleeping town
Wandering, pondering the definition of a loaded word,
A single collection of characters
Arranged, rearranged, and weighed
Color softens the eternal night
Brilliant crimson bounded by deep blacks,
Red winged blackbird streaked where the bluff meets the sky
What’s in a word, anyway
Driver of perception, of recollection, and choice
A word without a voice swells in the abyssal mind
No time to consider on the fly
A prodigious world to conquer in the nick of time
Lambent tongues of light yawn across dewed verdure
Epiphany lurches into consciousness
Today is not a date nor a definition
But an opportunity to thrive
To create, to relate in the allowed space of
Unknown wonders given life by forever
“Today until tomorrow” recites itself
Take claim to “now you see it, now you don’t”
Settle down as if the game has not begun
Margaret Heltzel, Ohio University | The 2019 Mary Withers Rural Writing Fellow at Boyd’s Station