We Should Leave Tokyo Tonight, JC Alfier, 2023. Collage.
Gratitude List #40
Ace Boggess
Forgive me when I praise my wealth
of memories of coffees.
Six years old, sitting across from my father
who drank Maxwell House.
I don’t know why I wanted to be like him.
He was beating me at chess, &
I got my first taste of bitterness.
At a restaurant with a lover,
both of us dabbling, high on pills.
She bid me try a cappuccino.
It lacked flavor, although sweetened by desire.
In the lobby at the Cleveland Clinic,
I first experienced rapture
of a Starbucks kiosk, ordered a latte
with syrup called Valencia,
orangish, delightful as sherbet on a summer day.
My mother arranged a meeting
with poet David Rigsbee,
dating a friend of hers at the time.
He & I drank coffee for an hour
while we forgot to chat about poetry &
ended up discussing Aristotle:
how every conversation about poetry should go.
Praise, too, the cups of instant Taster’s Choice
in prison, made with lukewarm tap water
during lockdowns for whatever whim.
Praise the many tall paper cups of freedom.
Praise the aromatic & the burned.
Praise the warm, coffee-mouthed greetings
of friends & hours of pours
as I listened to local bands or poets
while I waited for my turn.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.