Jesse always makes coffee in Westerns.
There is always some whiskered fellow
named Jesse and he is always making
coffee. But that coffee, in that tin pot,
in that wild west, just think how terrible
it must have tasted compared to
the delicious coffees made today,
unlike those that were made and
were made quite awfully,
in the days of yesteryear, by Jesse.

A damnation: this is a verb that occurred in the past,
and continues to occur, or whose effect is felt, to this day.
For example: I used to own a set of beautiful flutes,
beautiful Champagne flutes, with you.

According to David Cavanagh, he was found encased
in a glacier in the Alps.

 

Since he was upright, as far as he is concerned,
he is still walking in the Alps

 

as he begins to notice a chill in the air and
a darkening of the sky.

 

It’s been slow going for some time now –
This old man wonders:

 

Will I ever reach the new world?

 

Probably not. So he turns
around, and says:

 

time to go home.

My doctor’s note says that I shouldn’t run.
It’s the color of an Idaho potato.
When it was written, it was the color
of a beautiful cloud on a summer day.

Why did it never occur to me that his fingers
have touched these same places a thousand times
before, and in a slightly different way each time,
and each time with a varying degree of precision,
and each time with joy, and sorrow, never knowing
which it would be before it arrives, this time,
or the other

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Ricky Garni grew up in Miami and Maine. He works as a graphic designer by day and writes music by night. COO, a tiny collection of short prose printed on college-lined paper with found materials such as coins, stamps, was recently released by Bitterzoet Press.‎