Like Cold Coffee – Trista Mateer



Write a letter in which you forgive them. Page 51. 

So two people can love each other and still spiral down the kitchen sink like cold coffee poured from the mug.

So you don’t come back to me.

And all the phone calls were really just phone calls.

And all the metaphors are stuck in their poems.

So I got on the plane and you never even met me on the other end and no one can understand why I forgive you for it.

But I do.

I never tell you.

But I do.


Trista Mateer’s book The Dogs I Have Kissed won the Goodreads Choice Award Best Poetry prize (award? category? I have no idea how you phrase this) last year and that’s the first I heard of her. There is a wonderful intimacy in everything she writes and she’s far braver than I am, or at least that’s how what I feel when I read her work. There’s always a sense of letting go of something painfully beautiful and the idea of liquid seems to return again and again, whether it’s sweat, cold coffee, water being wrung out of a sponge or something else.

Read her books, buy her work, follow her on twitter and support her on patreon.


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