"Right Back With Coffee" by Shanna Alden

I have spent most of my life as a writer,

spinning universes and microscope lenses,

cosmic horrors, and hope.

Intellectual treatise, statistical research, and internet rant.

but despite this,

and despite months of trying,

I am shit at writing love poems.

And you,

you deserve love poems

but convention and tradition offer me no council

I mean,

I could promise pull down the moon for you,

and I’m sure you’d be impressed by my scientific prowess

as I tear chapters from your favorite science fiction

to build the world’s first tractor beam...

But the minute I turn that thing on,

oceans will pull back from distant shores

and rush towards our coastal town

killing hundreds of our friends

and thousands of innocent fish somewhere in the vicinity of Tahiti,

and I just don’t think expressing love with the mass murder of people

...and fish

makes a whole lot of sense.

You can call me unromantic,

but no matter how fond of you I am,

I just don’t think any one person is worth an extinction level event.

I could tell you that your soulful, eyes shine like the sun,

that you are like staring at the sun,

But, one of the myriad reasons I love you

is that unlike some other loves,

in some other poems,

you are not out to blind me.

...and unlike the sun,

you don't give me skin cancer.

I am suspicious that

celestial metaphors secretly suck.

Maybe I’m being too literal,

but I feel like comparing our love to silent,

deadly titans, suspended in cold unknowable expanse, is like saying

we will always be so distant, we will only really see each other

in the reflections of our past.  

I want better for us,

words that don’t imply

emotions have rendered us scientifically illiterate sociopaths.

After hours and months, the best I’ve been able to come up with is this:

I'll be right back, with coffee.

No, seriously,

I think these might be

The Most Romantic Words.

…Hear me out.

When I say, I’ll be right back with coffee

I mean I will face blindness,

from the actual sun,

at whiskey hangover o’clock,

so you can sleep a little longer.

I mean I want your mind to function at full capacity

because while, yes, you are inarguably beautiful,

I’m very much like a zombie

in that I am really into you for your brains.

It means, I want to give you comfort

and as proper Seattleites

our comfort curls steaming

from mugs clutched between fingers

and tongues tempered to know

a little bitterness enhances warmth.

When I say, “I’ll be right back with coffee”,

I mean you’ve known me to leave,

And I have known you to leave,

and we’ve seen each other run

both away from and toward dangerous things

...like each other

and while we may put cold unknowable distance between us,

if I can provide warmth, or comfort, or a few minutes of peace

rest assured,

even if I have to go for a while,

I’ll be right back, with coffee.

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