Cups of Misery

Cups of Misery
Jan Marin Tramontano

The streets paved in gold are pitted; cups of misery fill deep ruts. No haven for an immigrant philosopher with waning hope of refuge, resisting the slip into familiar despair. Too poor to afford bus fare home to see his beloved more than once each month.

He bargains with an invisible power to teach him how to live well, to shed the coat of many colors that make him foreign—

Like the young boy on the ship, he nourishes a tidal wave of desolation, an interior rage burns steadily. He fans embers of disappointment that belie his quiet exterior.

Is it too much to ask at the end of a protracted day to have a meal Sophie cooked,
stretch out at night, nuzzled next to her warm, soft body, awaken to the aroma of her coffee?

He imagines this as a kind of paradise, a place where loneliness is checked at the door.

***

Jan Marin Tramontano, a writer living in upstate New York, is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Woman Sitting in a Café and other poems of Paris and Floating Islands, a memoir about her father, I Am a Fortunate Man. and her poems appear in her poetry collective’s anthology, Java Wednesdays. Her poetry, stories, book reviews, and interviews have been published in numerous literary journals, magazines, and newspapers. Her first novel will be coming out later this year.