The Apostrophe Blog
There is a very cool coffeehouse called The Stacks two miles from our house down Killingsworth Street. It not only serves coffee and breakfast burritos but is also a community lending library. I met friends at The Stacks for coffee and conversation a few days back. All around us sat (mostly) silent people with their varied incarnations of coffee drinks and (a handful) giant water bottles. Nearly all the other patrons were either wearing headphones or staring into one screen or another; I did notice one person crocheting what looked like pot holders. We were the quartet who talked, ranted, commiserated, and laughed.
Inside the front door of The Stacks, there is a gumball machine that publishes Gumball Poetry. For a quarter, you can purchase yourself a poem from a roster of poets whose work was selected for inclusion in the little capsules along with a Life Saver mint. I happen to be one of the featured poets for Winter 2024/2025. That is part of why I wanted to finally visit this joint—to see what this poetry machine was all about.
For the cost of about $1.50 or so I tried—unsuccessfully—to snag a capsule with my poem in it from the gumball machine. No luck that day. I am going to rustle up another pile of quarters and give it another whirl one day soon. I will also drop off a handful of books to add to their floor-to-ceiling shelves.
The public domain image above is a 1920 photograph of the stacks in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- The Last Bouquet - January 17, 2025
- Get Your 25-cent Poetry Here… - January 16, 2025
- Friday Afternoon Landscape - January 10, 2025
