Tag Archives: coffee

2026, Day Book, everyday words, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.7.26

1.7.26

Begin again.

The world’s machine’s mechanisms run regardless in a pre-ordained program covered in iteration upon iteration of user design models. We are so far from how the soup is made, it’s all a needle prick to the gut and the promise of future health savings. 

Begin again, word machine: with your hot coffee, tart apple, pipe, and (different) hip pain. Begin again because they are counting on you. Begin again because you are counting on yourself. Begin with your weapons of choice: a sharpened pencil, bare paper, the naked insistence which fuels you. Move the gears, grease the pistons. Give us a little play. 

Begin again.

These steamboat metaphors break my heart. But it is a loving pain, a teary-eyed executioner.

Move, piston. Move.

ma
chine

clang
type

a diction
ary

with
fingers

a fingers
of diction

aries
ma
chine
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2025, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, Working Class Literature

Post-Percolated Sonnet on Labor Day

Somewhere in the end-of-season sale landscape
history starves for lack of awareness
living on liquid sugar and fruit- flavored gummy snacks.
There is nothing to believe anymore
outside of memeworld proclamations. 
We must be self-styled archeologists 
finding earthenware hand-thrown truth
buried under a casino construction site
finding solace in our work, making the mind forget
as the dying kids of summer find an abandoned swimming pool
for reel swan dives while their parents, trying
not to give into wet dreams of their last cigarette
doomscroll through how-to videos of shit 
their grandparents tried to teach them.

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2025, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, summer

It’s All Good

traffic noise ground and air on the sidewalk outside
the Schnitzelburg coffeeshop
the song of a conversation not in English – a light, stale breeze,  coffee black
and blackberry muffin warmed

the door dash driver, twice returned
with the IT’S ALL GOOD font license
plate
August cicadas yodeling death ballads from the trees

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