Coffee

Overheard: Barista to customer: We have the festive one, if you’re looking for gifts.

Where it took me: The line itself made me think of how much marketing there is in coffee now. When I was growing up, for all I knew of it, it was coffee. My parents ordered it when we went to restaurants and we had to wait for them to finish before we could leave. I don’t recall anything about festive. Or bold, or mild, or Canadian, for that matter. My first experience with coffee was as something to keep me warm during a week-long youth retreat. But that first experience is completely tied up, for me, with being 16, becoming an adult, and my relationships with others. The premise for the poem comes from a prompt to write from the point of view of an animal; that gave me the way in.