I dug for verbs
in a dark corner
of a coffee shop
near a Nebula
Award winner
who never saw me,
nor the life,
at the intersection of 11th Avenue.
She made life
in science fiction,
handwritten,
scrawled across
yellow legal notepads.
Her table a hovering saucer,
she, the captain,
and her words
the creatures
of her unfettered galaxy.
That day, like sandpaper
on the tile floor
cutting through
the coffee talk,
a new regular
shuffled in,
his left side
nearly paralyzed
from a farm accident.
In him, I saw my father
emptied
by farming’s toil.
With his right hand,
he dropped open
a pocket-lined-notepad
on the counter before the barista.
She flipped through
this farmer’s rewritten kingdom.
Then his finger fell
onto these words:
small black coffee.
Now, I am witness,
twelve years later,
to his fettered kingdom,
my own body’s
kingdom falling
spontaneously,
displacing me
from my family’s land.
Now, I leave
my verbs on the page,
no longer the soil.
Here, I drop my hands open
at a new intersection of mercy.