Coffee with Friends
John C. Mannone
After my morning matins, eyes shut
in part, the sun is a bit oblate and rises
slowly through the horizon, cracking
the purple clouds. And I cannot hear
the dawning songs of Carolina wrens
or cardinals above the high-pitch buzz
of the coffee grinder. Soon, the music
of the birds returns, and of the coffee,
its percolator bumping the extract
in beat with the voice of coffee in the
small glass dome on the lid of the pot.
A porcelain white mug, microwaved
warm, is ready for the essential elixir.
That black liquor swirls in my cup
in its own stream of consciousness.
Entrained air gathers as clear bubbles
quickly collapsing, shimmers the dark
surface. A thin oil film rainbows in the
glint of low-angle light—a portal
to the past. I pause on Columbian
mountains, see Juan Valdez, my friend.
I assure you he was not fictional
(but maybe Conchita the mule was).
Not everyone likes coffee, so I won’t
spend much time here in Constantinople.
Murad IV would sew coffee drinkers
into a leather bag and throw them
into the waters of the Bosphorus.
He is not my friend. So I go back
more centuries to the ancient coffee
forests on an Ethiopian plateau, find
Kaldi, another friend, who told me
about his herd ingesting the berries,
becoming sleepless and rambunctious
goats. The local monastery learned.
Then brewed a drink with that plant’s
stimulating beans. Kept them awake
through long hours of evening prayer.
The whole world heard them rejoice.
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John C. Mannone has poems accepted in North Dakota Quarterly, the 2020 Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, Foreign Literary Review, The Menteur, Blue Fifth Review, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. His won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest in poetry (2020) and the Carol Oen Memorial Fiction Prize (2020). He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His latest collection, Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry, is forthcoming from Linnet’s Wings Press (2020). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A retired physics professor, he lives near Knoxville, Tennessee. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com