Black Breakfast
In certain restaurants, you can order black breakfast.
The waitress will bring coffee and a cigarette.
Our language in this world: pleonasms as
“I saw it with my own eyes.” Well, of course
you did. What else? In this way, a little excessive.
You don’t sleep in. You’re not hungry.
Not so much appetite, you try to explain, as
much as transgression between what is and is
not mouth the human craves — that which is
distinguishable from inner dark, but only insofar
as drought is distinguishable from the drought-
stricken. That hunger. There is blood and ash
on the table. Your legs are crossed under, thigh
over thigh. You are thinking about someone
else. He — vast as a colony, and tender still.
We, in all the shifting alarms of dawn. Our bodies
are now given their places next to
the old themes: love, loss, the stiff jaws of
the dead and the distressed. We come to accept
natural slip ups, pleasure as a lovely put on,
and, of course, beauty as the slow question
mark in the universe’s argument with itself. This sort
of consent, we never come to know, is commendable.
In later years, I remember the good:
The freckles on your forearms.
The feral realism of your bird calls.
The way you take your coffee: black, no sugar.
By Issam Zineh
Get to know Issam Zineh on twitter at @izineh
Work for Monthly Verse is selected through our editorial process. New poems are selected from authors that submitted work for the last issue. Read more authors by subscribing to Fjords.