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