by Brandon Noel
When I was a kid, if someone had a pop,
you could haggle a swig from their can
with a promise not to backwash.
We didn’t really know that whatever our mouths touch,
something goes back in, waits at the bottom,
a blue ribbon in our gut, a climbing vine for belly fire.
The ancient art of reading tea leaves is called, “tasseography”,
but it can include coffee grounds or the sediments left by wine.
Anything will do, really, whatever material remains,
the important part is drinking, it is an exchange.
At work yesterday, I stood in the machine shop,
a red balloon in my lower back,
and downed the last cold gulp from my coffee mug.
Little shards of metal emerged from the dark brown receding liquid.
I recognized them from my raw material: Stainless steel scraps,
their impure elements unnaturally removed,
they looked like glistening threads of silver,
tarnished in bean juice, tiny nests of fool’s gold,
metallic seeds sprouting in the upturned ceramic.
I googled the best approximation of the sign,
the abstract leftovers of my work, mixed with spit and java.
From what I could gather, it meant: “She works with her hands”.
I held the grey porcelain cup to my face,
I held it like a secret,
I held it like a tincantelephone, its wire pulled taught,
with the end stretching invisibly towards
the dark haired woman I love,
and I whispered, “Run home
and press yourself through me tonight,
hot and scalding, held to your mouth,
poured over, I am ground up—
a fine powder, waiting in the jug.”
Whatever we leave behind us
only the other can read.
Brandon Noel (He/Him), lives in Northeastern Ohio and has worked as a machinist for the last ten years while writing on his breaks and brief moments of down time. Poetry is this struggle he can’t seem to quit. Sometimes he wins and other times a poem stumbles out. He facilitates a local monthly writers group called, “The Makeshift Poets”. Brandon turned 33 last December and has two daughters, ages 10 and 5, whom he raises with their mother. He has self-published two poetry collections: “Mongrel” (2015) and “Infinite Halves” (2017), which are available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/BrandonLNoel