A Visitor's Guide to Free Coffee

by Nick Allison

If you ever spend an entire month in a hospital—as a visitor, not a patient—you’ll start to learn a few things. Like how the coffee costs more at the first-floor café than it does on the second, but it’s free in the fourth-floor ICU, where there’s even an espresso machine. And if you befriend the nurses—on any floor—they might let you slip into the lounge, where the snacks and caffeine cost nothing. You’ll learn other things too, as you sit in the cafeteria one afternoon, drafting a poem you might title A Visitor’s Guide to Free Coffee, and watch a young mother and her son—his head bald from chemo—walk in. You’ll see his face light up over a bowl of cereal and feel a little foolish for thinking about coffee prices in a place dedicated to saving the most vulnerable. He’ll beam at his mom, thrilled by the simple gift of Cocoa Puffs, and she’ll smile back bravely as she leans in to kiss his pale skin, while her world threatens to crumble behind tired eyes.

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Nick Allison is a combat veteran, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in The Shore, Eunoia Review, HuffPost, The Chaos Section, New Verse News, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the poetry anthology Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age. More of his work can be found here and here.