Cafés & Cocktails

Our next call for submissions will be for the Summer 2027 special issue on Cafés & Cocktails, a tribute to the coffeeshop window seat and saloon barstool as a setting for conversations, confessions, propositions. We welcome a broad interpretation of this theme, but we’d love stories set in restaurants (or about restaurants), personal essays about memorable dining experiences, poems about martinis (see below for a piece from the archive: “Of Time and the Riviera” by Wilbur Gaffney) and other libations (speaking of: see also this issue of Fusion). Even if your piece just hints at the theme (a story with just one brief scene in a café, for example, or a poem about a tea party, etc), please send it along.

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From Prairie Schooner, Winter 1949:

Of Time and the Riviera
By Wilbur Gaffney

Slenderly not without pause
to study her lipline in the bar mirror
she goes to a linened table and orders Martinis.
Three Martinis are the key of the afternoon
and under the minkfur the heart warms,
under the cockleshell hat she smiles
as the heavy doors of the afternoon swing open
into the lightspangled brittleness of cocktail time.

Minked fantastics swim past the enchanted eyes
and the loss of deepest nothing is atoned for
by the arrival of more smooth sparkling nothings.

And so does the fourth Martini…