Iced Coffee

The coffee gone quickly, pulled
Up a foggy straw of translucent plastic,
I tilt the cup forward, angled
Acutely under my lip’s horizontal axis,
And hear the crisp rattling of a dozen ice cubes,
Their organs partly missing, having dissolved
into a thick crowd of milk and molten sugar.
What is left of them
Is a skeletal form –
Ribs retracted wide, knots within knots
Of cracked phalanges, a hip bone thinned
From osteoporosis, eyes
Evading dark orbits, tongues
Peeled away from their glossy faces. 

What is ice but a suspension of water bulbs

In a state comatose, peculiar?
Their elbows tied within a frozen lattice
With swollen arms, edematous legs, faces
Held in fixed expressions. H2O -
A triad of hydrogen, oxygen, left breathless,
In a makeshift cage, which upon
The slightest lick of heat dissolves into life;
Into its familiar form, the sight of ocean’s belly.  

I take them in my mouth, one by one,

And bite into their skulls, crunching
On them, like I would bones
Of a chicken leg dressed
In a skirt of well-fed muscles,
Breaking them
Into smaller and smaller chunks,
Themselves sweaty, erratic. A population
Of them melt into water, diffuse
Through my tongues muscular roots. Others
Scratch my mouth’s fleshy dome with fingers
Amputated by heat until they, too, tire and collapse
Into an outgoing basket of warm exhalations.

The absence of caffeine, felt,
I pour myself another stream of cold brew coffee,
Three spoonfuls of milk,
And a new family of ice.

And before long, 

The cycle repeats itself.