Hi. I’m Chera Hammons, a poet from the Texas Panhandle, here for Poets on the Plains. It’s such a privilege to share one of my poems with you.
My poetry collections have received awards through PEN Texas, the Writer’s League of Texas, and the Texas Institute of Letters. My two newest books are coming out soon: Salvage List from Belle Point Press in June 2025, and Birds of America through The Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in June 2026. My writing has appeared in publications such as Poetry magazine, Rattle, and The Sun. I hold an MFA from Goddard College and formerly served as writer in residence at West Texas A&M University. I live in Amarillo, Texas, with a menagerie of horses, donkeys, cats, chickens, and peacocks.
The poem I’d like to share with you today is called “Apocalypse Coffee.” At its heart, it’s about how sometimes, the endings we expect aren’t the ones we get. Sometimes they aren’t endings at all.
Apocalypse Coffee
After finding the recipe on the internet,
we spend the afternoon picking faded gold mesquite beans
from the tree by the barn. For every good pod,
there’s one with a tiny hole, and we toss those
to the horses, who chew the sugar out
and don’t care about the worms inside.
As we work, we talk about how the soldiers
in other centuries learned to make this kind of coffee
between battles, when the regular kind had run out.
We agree it’s good to know how to do something different, to adapt.
Sometimes I wonder what I’ll do if everything falls apart.
Or maybe it’s not that the whole world ends,
only our world ends, the two of us as we are now,
watching each other over something we made together
as the cream blooms and steam swirls up from a dark cup.
Ever since I found out I was sick, I can’t stop thinking
about how small I am in this house, this yard,
this canyon, this galloping country and clouded horizon,
and how the people who came before us are at peace now
in their domes of earth, slowly turning to stone.
We’re like embers that bloom from the fire into the night.
After this hour of our imagined disaster, the horses learned to wait for us
near the mesquite tree, though the beans are gone,
and the seasons will change soon.
Even while you think you can’t go on,
the day carries you.
When I wrote this poem in 2016, I had just received a diagnosis that meant the health issues I had been experiencing were chronic and had no cure. The larger world, as it is now, was also in turmoil. So it was a relief to have a reason to go outside and look at something I’d always taken for granted—the mesquite beans hanging from the scrubby tree beside the barn—and know that there was a purpose for them that I hadn’t ever considered before.
Mesquite trees are largely considered nuisances here. One of my neighbors has put a lot of time, money, and effort into removing all the of trees in her pasture, heedless of the fact that her miniature donkeys spent hours scratching on them happily, or that scissor-tailed flycatchers nested every year in the branches, or that the roadrunners used to wait for the scissortails to leave so that they could raid the nests. There was so much life there, going on unnoticed.
Most people won’t ever know what it is to stand in the late summer sun, the satisfying ping of the beans dropped into a plastic bucket, the cicadas singing in bursts, and the horses hanging their heads over the fence, whickering and begging with their soft intelligent eyes for what we harvest. Most people won’t know the pleasure of the toasted honey smell spreading throughout the house as the mesquite beans are roasted, or the sweet deep flavor and floral and honey scent of what is brewed. Likewise, there are things that I will miss simply because I don’t know how to look for them.
Mesquite bean coffee is meant to be nothing more than a substitute for the real thing. But everything about it, to me, is lovely. It was only chance that led me to try it. And whenever I read this poem, which is nearly ten years old now, I remember all over again how very lucky I am.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Chera Hammons, Panhandle poet, coming to you from Amarillo, Texas, the Yellow City.
“Apocalypse Coffee” is used with permission.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST AND FEATURED POET
Chera Hammons is a winner of the Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. In her free time, she enjoys reading, birdwatching, spending time with her horses and donkeys, and caring for her houseplant collection, which is slowly but surely taking over her entire living space. “Apocalypse Coffee” can be found in the 2020 book Maps of Injury. More information can be found at www.cherahammons.com.
