• Skip to content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Frank X. Christmas: Coffee, Ice Cream

June 7, 2020 by PBQ Leave a Comment

Sitting here drinking coffee makes me shaky,
hasty for the minute in the hour of the day
when the three year old redhead with the mona lisa
smile in the picture atop an unadorned table just off
to the side of my unmade bed walks in with
inscrutable calm, the origins of which disarm me
as if the bowl of ice cream she orders with
cherries before even taking her seat is the world
and all it contains not to mention the sly and impossible
smile in that snapshot next to me here, real as life,
owing no doubt to the fact my composure is
off-beam and wooden, for one thing I’m low on
caffeine and as such prone to apparitions and
wraiths, now you see them now you don’t,
addition by subtraction. 

Filed Under: Issue 100, Poetry 100 Tagged With: Frank X. Christmas

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ Poet’s Publishing Premier: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

Issue 100 Has Arrived!

Temporarily Closing Submissions

PBQ presents: Slam Bam Reboot

Storytelling in a Box with Neil Bardhan at Writers Room

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org