You are so familiar with your coffee stains.
You know them like the curves of your palm.
You know the caramel splash that inaugurated
the first notepad of a set you bought with your pay
from a short story you published last year.
You know the droplets of mocha latte
that fell every few seconds as you paused
with the cup mid-mouth, mid-thought, lost
in plot tangles and confused about your characters.
You know the cappuccino rings on the back
page of your pad, when you ran off
for a desperate cigarette break,
left your cup sitting on the climax of your story.
But I don’t drink coffee, only green tea
and I want to be as familiar with my tea stains
as you are with your coffee spills.
I want my stories to be as steeped in tea leaves,
I want to know what happens when I pour a cup
onto a sheaf of paper, or onto my Tide-cleaned
and Clorox-bleached white cotton sheets.
I want to know if the tea would leave
tea-leaf stains that look like the leaves of grass
I pictured Whitman speaking of in his poem,
or mint and sea-foam green stains that take on
the silhouette of coffee droplets and rings I mistakenly left
on top of the manuscript I slaved on all night,
or bunniculas in top hats and wide sunglasses that
Julia Quinn’s heroine would sketch at dawn,
or hemispherical or crescent-headed platypuses,
the lab rats of a scientific experiment gone wrong,
or the usual linked and dotted circles
and fuzzy cumulonimbus clouds?
I will carry out my own experiment,
make two cups of green tea, and let the tea tell my story
pour one cup on a sheaf of papers, and the other
on a pair of folded, freshly laundered cotton sheets,
drip the remaining droplets from the rim of my cup,
see if the pattern on the paper sheaf
tells the story of the golden green rice fields I rode past in trains
see if the pattern on the laundered sheets
tells the story of deciduous trees I read under in the Iowa summers,
see if the patterns edge a row of squiggles on a sea of olive green,
squiggles that read like the olive trees in Greece I have always read about
but have never seen,
squiggles that read like the terraced rice fields in Southeast Asia I want to visit,
but have never been,
the squiggles of my story.
Sayeeda T Ahmad is a Bangladeshi writer and poet who graduated from the MA in English – Creative Writing program at the University of Northern Iowa, and is a winner of the Selina Terry Poetry Award and Muse Masters Season 2 Performance Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ditch, Stone’s Throw Magazine, monsoonletters, Six Season’s Review, Wasafiri, Anomaly, and Plum Tree Tavern.