Coltrane at The Cage

A Tuesday night in November and the news is bad,
awful, worse than we could have imagined somehow.
It feels like it might possibly be the end of the world.
But Stefanie agrees to meet me at The Cage to share
a basket of hot cheese balls. I’m washing them down
with cold Bell’s drafts and Stef’s drinking red wine,
which our server brings to her in mini plastic bottles
like the booze bottles you see when you fly on planes.
And we try not to talk about the news because it hurts
and makes us angry or makes us sick to our stomachs.
To think that people can be so ugly, so filled with hate.
Or else we talk around the news by talking up things
that bring us some bits of joy, either the distractions
we provide ourselves or the little things people say
or do that help us to cope with this skewed reality.
I’m telling her about playing games with Kris’s kids
or about catching Zombo’s radio show and how his
song selection made me laugh so hard that I called
into the station to thank him. And Stef is telling me
about how she finds ways to be a positive force in
the lives of her students, spreading that goodness.
And we are talking about music, specifically about
John Coltrane, and a guy a few booths down from us
plays Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” on the juke
and Stef laughs and says, “The Cage…I love this bar.”

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives outside Pittsburgh in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. His poems have been collected in four books: Unattended Fire, The River Underneath the City, Muskrat Friday Dinner, and Meet Me Where We Survive. He is the editor of Low Ghost Press.