| The Plastic Cup Kim Roberts So it’s one of those bars, see, where everything is painted black: the walls, the windows, the crowd, and the music itself, banging loud and black. We’re all drinking beer from these clear plastic cups, they don’t trust us with glass and the band’s tuneless and it’s too loud to speak, though what is there to say? The scene, the people, everything’s clouded, and the music everyone keeps thinking they might come to like. We could be anywhere, Detroit or Houston, with these spotlights shining their circles randomly on our heads, until this girl, she puts her empty cup down right in the middle of a circle and it glows, it glows like God right there on the floor. And it’s got you, the kind of light you wish could blaze inside you, solid enough to hurt. It’s got you. You’re sure it’s not just the booze, and that cup is not a cup. It’s larger. Its light could locate you, stop the banging, could change, could slow, you’re sure, you don’t know how, the thing that makes your standing still here a flight. |