Monday, October 15, 2018

Take Heart



One of those days when you realize the best thing
about the day was the barista who made the espresso-
and-foam heart on top of your latte and said, this
is for you, which was enough to make you hurry out
the door before anyone could see what it had done to you.
Otherwise, the day was full of bigots and homophobes
and a royal flush of other –ists and –phobes, and a man
at the grocery who said something to the little girl
in the cart behind him in the checkout line singing
that Katy Perry song, and whatever it was he said,
it was enough to quiet her roar. What is wrong
with people? you say to your cat at the end of the day,
as you dump Grilled Liver & Chicken in Gravy Fancy
Feast into his bowl and scritch behind his ears
while you tell him about the barista and the heart
and the girl in the shopping cart, looking, I suppose,
for a little support, the lick of a rough pink tongue to say,
I don’t know about the others but this human is okay,
but who instead lifts one hind leg skyward and gets
to work, so that it comes down to the fleeting foam heart
skywritten across your coffee to stand between you
and the thousand swastikas, the Katy-haters, the night. 

(first published in The American Journal of Poetry, 2018)