DAY SIXTY-ONE – Kirsten Irving

Chalkboard, London

New coffee place
looks like
plugged in and heaving

coffee and brownies
coffee and vapes
street food and coffee
award-winning coffee art
coffee and life drawing
naked coffee
coffee on beard with gouache

Oh it is surely all for me
me being
of this age
of this bent
of this time oh thank you

I might go when I’m weak
tired from worrying
past the chalkboard
with its coffee pun
one side its prison
-rape joke on the other

past the faced-up chiller
the half-full cake stands
up before the board of coffee

where a lad will listen to me
my cracked voice my doing normal
and dash off a hieroglyph
on a cup he hands to a barista
who is chipper because
he doesn’t have to be here he just
does it for the love of coffee

and a good cup it just takes you away
dunnit past rent hikes
and carpal tunnel
and a dull job held like a halberd
and the rising glass towers
and online petitions
the short green man
the portioned-out heart
the unexplained fees
and all the noise that isn’t coffee

drink to the the dregs this is
artisan stuff they’re making
so tongue it
taste Borneo, Kenya, Colombia

Oh I am shaking shaking

 
 
 
Kirsten Irving is one half of the team behind award-winning press Sidekick Books and the editor of more than ten anthologies. Her first collection, Never Never Never Come Back, was published by Salt. Since then, her work has been exhibited in a live magazine, translated into Russian and Spanish and thrown out of a helicopter. She tweets at @KoftheTriffids