Paper Cups, a sestina

Steam seeps,

escaping the small slit

of our paper cups.

It struggles out with a contented hiss

and spreads like a web over our silent house,

comes down around our stupefied faces, caught

in this caffeinated trance. Silk webs have caught

their prey and the simmering light of day seeps

through the cracks of our boarded up windows in our silent house.

With our ears pricked and eyes narrowed to slits

we envision the black widow and hear her hiss

in her web helplessly as a paper cup

traps her. We abandon that image, back to our paper cups.

We take sips and rid ourselves of thoughts we might be caught

up in, like a grimalkin, we defend against thoughts with a hiss

so feral it will chase away any shred of reality that seeps

through the huge fracturing fragments, through the slits

in the barriers we have build around our minds in this silent house.

Sipping, we move like automatons through our silent house.

Tenaciously holding on to our lifelines, our paper cups,

that invigorate us and keep lethargic reality from flooding through the slits

and bearing us away, where we would surely be caught

in the drone of life and miss out on the steam that seeps

from what we cradle in our hands. It rises through the air, a calm hiss.

Unwanted daylight makes our skin bubble and hiss

as we emerge like a herd from the confines of the silent house

to find more of that boiling, amber liquid that can’t seem to seep fast enough for our ravenous bodies as it pours into our stained and beaten paper cups.

It passes through our lips so quickly that we are no longer caught

by this world. Mercifully, our ties to reality are once again slit

like the last string connecting a marionette to its master, slit.

The echoing sound booms through this house like a tempest, this hiss

that has somehow begun to swirl round and round, is caught

and fills our wordless void of existence, this silent house,

with a static that is forever blaring from the mouths of our paper cups

as the fogging steam fills the air that forever seeps,

never stopping, it seeps ‘til we can no longer see the slits

and we’re lost in the chaos of our paper cups and their hiss

until we waste away in our silent house, caught in our own paper cups.

@ 2014 by Katrina Galvez, originally published in Humid 6