Home » Poems » Saeed Koushan » A cup of longing

A cup of longing

Your coffee cup still waits  
on the kitchen table—  
the one you slammed down  
that Tuesday morning,  
coffee splattering our crossword  
with goodbye.

**Week One:** I scrub the stain  
with bleach and fury,  
curse your name  
into the empty rooms.

**Week Six:** I catch myself  
setting two plates for dinner,  
pause halfway to the cabinet,  
my hand suspended  
between habit and surrender.

**Week Ten:** The dentist calls—  
your name still echoes  
in their appointment book.  
I hang up,  
imagining you somewhere  
forgotten.

**Week Fifteen:** I find  
your shopping list  
tucked in *Beloved*—  
milk, oranges, that good bread—  
your handwriting  
still believing  
in our future tense.

*French toast this weekend,* you'd written—  
and laughed when I burned the edges.

**Week Twenty:** I'm learning  
to sleep diagonally,  
to claim the whole bed  
as mine,  
but still I wake  
reaching for the shape  
you left in cool sheets.

Freedom tastes like guilt.

**Week Twenty-Five:** The barista  
at our coffee shop  
stops asking  
*Where's your better half?*  
I realize I've been coming here  
alone for months,  
ordering black coffee  
instead of your lavender oat latte,  
dusted with too much cinnamon.

**Week Thirty:** I can say  
*my apartment*  
instead of *ours*  
without my voice  
breaking.

**Week Thirty-Five:** I carry  
your coffee cup  
to the garden,  
fill it with soil  
and basil seeds.  
You always said  
I should grow something.

The green shoots  
push through—  
stubborn as hope,  
persistent as your humming  
at the sink.

I water them  
with what's left  
of missing you,  
and discover  
I have been growing  
all along.

I pour the last of us  
into the earth  
and watch it bloom.

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