When Black Coffee Sits Sweetly

Posted byRebecca Evans | Poet | Essayist | Artist | WarriorPosted inUncategorized

(Substack Post Dated Sept 1st, 2026)

Tomorrow brings surgery. My 17th or 19th while in this bag of skin. When I leave this world, I’ll leave lighter, fewer organs and rage than the state in which I arrived.

Today. I make a list of nourishing things: cool morning breeze, cricket choruses, fire pits and poetry, slow reading and even slower writing, pausing to push mundane tasks—dishwashing, dusting, laundering—into meditative moments of restoration.

Tomorrow they remove the infected kidney stone, too large to pass even with a stent. Perhaps tomorrow they will send the said-stone for analysis and determine what, within my body, helped build this beast. In a week, they will re-culture my blood and hopefully find the bacteria has flushed away. I won’t ask, Where did it go?

Today. I read pages of Tao Te Ching. I read this same book while serving in the military. A few pages every morning. Once I finished the book, I began again. I did this for four years and now, 40 years later, I see the way life shifts. I note the way we re-absorb story, language, another’s wisdom based on our ever-shifting lived experiences.

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Published by Rebecca Evans | Poet | Essayist | Artist | Warrior

Rebecca Evans writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. She’s a memoirist, essayist, artist, and poet, infusing her love of empowerment with craft. She teaches high school teens in the Juvie system through journaling, empowerment and visual art. Rebecca is also a military veteran, an avid gardener, and shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons. She specializes in craft and explorative workshops for those who seek to dive deeper. She co-hosts Radio Boise’s Writer to Writer show on Stray Theater. She's earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Her poems and essays have appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, Hypertext Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, and more. Her books include When There are Nine (an anthology tributed to the life and achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg), Tangled in Blood (a memoir-in-verse)(2026 Literary Titan Award), Safe Handling (a collection-length poem), and AfterBurn (a flash essay collection, Moon Tide Press).

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