Consider The Frappuccino

caffeine’s godly powers

are only a few slurps away.

banish ennui! conquest thought with energy!

don’t taste, except what you remember you tasted of

the first frontier sip of Frappuccino.

don’t savor, slurp then suppress a belch of thanksgiving

Whitmanian prayer.

ignore the hum of the street outside

as you careen towards

momentary doldrum

ordinary routine.

it’s a workday, the morning line is long

and this is a call to order

for the disorderly god of the insulin dump.

harried stock exchanges and ass-kiss promises

can rarely be held off this sweetly.

Lindt at 3am

just one candy square is enough

to happily disrupt a paralyzed mind

the bitterness of an empty bed

is rendered moot and flaccid

the threats posed by midnight purgatories

are henceforth neutralized

Blackberries

they shine pewter

shyly

colors hidden beneath the black gleam

of tiny spheres in the dark soft light

too sacred to eat, fated to rot

unsaved

without someone to declare their beauty

Juliana “Jules” Schifferes is a poet from the Washington, DC area. She was the winner of the inaugural Luce Prize, awarded by Day Eight to an early-career poet of promise. She has published in The Mid-Atlantic Review (formerly Bourgeon) and Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Her themes vary, but she prefers the “object poem” genre and Zen “inflections” in her writing. Her influences shift over time, but right now she’s dwelling on Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rilke. She works at a civil society organization, fighting the good fight, when she’s not writing. In her free time, you’ll find her curled up with poetry and a cat.

Image: nagualdesign, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons