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CAFFEINE: A Love Story

by Jack Conway (bio after poetry)

He needed coffee and lots of it.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her sleep, he wondered if the relationship would last. He had been in so many before that didn’t, for one reason or another.

He woke early. It was the first time in the three months they had been dating that he slept over at her apartment. That was a big step. He always needed coffee first thing in the morning -- to get -- his heart pounding -- his blood pumping -- to shake the cobwebs from his head -- to get his karma in tune with the cosmos and his dogma in touch with the world. Coffee. Caffeine. Java. Joe.

He loved it first thing in the morning. That was the best cup -- the virgin cup -- for the rest of his coffee drinking day. That’s all he ever drank. He had forsaken soda and milk and juice and water. Even booze. All he ever liked to drink was coffee and the first one in the morning was always the best.

He loved it. He needed it. He craved it. But not just any coffee.

Rich. Dark.

Colombian -- heart-pounding -- eye-popping -- blood-pumping -- finger snapping -- toe-tapping -- it gives me the shakes coffee. Steaming hot. Black.

No sugar.

In the kitchen he found her coffee maker. He opened the cupboard door over the coffee maker where he thought her coffee might be. It was there. A jar of Hazelnut.

Decaf. Instant.

Copyright © 2002 + Jack Conway. All Rights Reserved.

About Jack Conway

Jack Conway’s newest book of poetry, Life Sentences, was published by North Country Press in 2002. His writing has appeared in: The Antioch Review ; Light: The Quarterly of Light Verse; The American Muse; Yankee; Bostonia; The New Renaissance; The Christian Science Monitor Poetry Motel; The Blue Monk, 12th Planet Literary Magazine, and The Perigrine Literary Review.

His work has been anthologized in: The Norton Anthology of Light Verse, Russell Baker, ed.; The Best Magazine Poetry of 1996, Dave Perkins, ed.; The Arvon Foundation International Poetry Anthology, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, eds. and The Encyclopedia of New England Culture, published by Yale University Press.

He is the author of the poetry chapbooks, One Horse Universe, (1992) and The Winter City: Eighteen Poems, (1984) and he is the author of, American Literacy: Fifty Books That Define Our Culture and Ourselves, published in 1994 by William Morrow. He is a former adjunct professor at Boston University and Fisher College and he is a member of the Sarah Doyle Writers’ Workshop at Brown University.

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