Table for one?

Outside Trotter’s Bakery

Coffee, and the music of what happens
washing in uneven tides
over sidewalk and street:
not quite audible, not yet found
by the traffic as it moves and halts.

Each day at twenty to eight
a pretty girl in 400 dollars’
worth of clothes gets into her Ford
and grinds the starter.
It rasps, then catches at last.

She segues off, into her world,
as other drivers pass, already
at work with cell phones
to their ears. What can there be
to say at this early hour?

East-facing windows reflect
the climbing sun. An unready man
walks in, necktie not yet knotted.
A woman uses the gift
of a red light to fuss with her hair.

Coffee, and again we take it on trust
this day like every day will in time
find its way, will compose itself anew
out of the morning’s assumptions,
the morning’s small doubts.

By Jim Rogers, St. Paul poet, author of the chapbook Sundogs, and editor of the Center for Irish Studies journal, New Hibernia Review


Thank god for coffee shops. On cold weekends from claustrophobic houses. Enough already with the stack of bills, those ladies in waiting, piled near the front mirror. Enough with the winter dust bunnies frolicking under the bed with each blast of the furnace. Off to the coffee shops I go for retreat or companionship, away from the responsibilities of home. Away, even, from the reprimands of the family. At coffee shops I need only listen if I want. Sitting in a coffee shop is like sitting at the bar, but without all the come-ons (okay, without the Laphroig, too). Way before the onset of Dunn Bros. and Caribou, my parents used to hang out at the old family place in Indianford: Tibbie’s. Mom said as a young girl she would sit on a stool at the edge of the bar at Tibbie’s while her mom and dad worked their shifts, she drinking a Coke and listening to all her relatives and the townspeople, all the losers and winners, the drunks and betrayed, the givers and takers. She’d say she learned many of life’s little lessons on that little stool in in south central Wisconsin.

My own daughter, a café cook and server, told me a story of one of the regulars at Sisu Coffee and Café in St. Paul. You might know Bill. If you do, picture him coming in the morning with steamed glasses, a heavy navy parka, his MTC card dangling from his backpack on one side and his padded lunch box hooked to the other.

“Now, you’re new here,” Bill says to my daughter. “Let me tell you. If I give you a twenty, you give me a ten, a five, and some ones. If I give you a ten, you give me a five and some ones.”

My daughter nods as she pours his medium light roast.

“If I give you a five, you give me some ones.” He pauses and chuckles. “See you’d never know I have a mental deficiency.”

She smiles as she hands Bill his coffee and some change.“Oh but the other thing you should know,” he says, “put the bills in my hand and the change in the cup.” He points to the tip cup and then turns toward the door.

You probably already keep these: notebooks filled with coffee shop prose or poetry. Do you know Lunch Poems, by Frank O’Hara? An Amazon reviewer writes this: “They are called Lunch Poems because that is the idea, poems that you might compose on your lunch break, walking around New York with some change in your pocket. . . .”


If you have any of your own lunch poems, St. Paul coffee shop poems, or Philly afternoon poems, tell us about them, and the spots we can go to best read—and write them.