Coffee, No Sugar

You ask me how I am.
I say 3809. I didn’t use to
answer that question
with the number of people dead.
I apologize.
These are different times.
Now how are you means
you’re alive so any response
will suffice. When I count sheep
to sleep at night
I get to 265. It’s a matter of survival.
How are you?
Remember the time
we went for a drive, a truck swerved
and we almost turned over. We thought
we would die. In the middle
of that brimstone highway
our eyes screamed
How are you?
Once upon a time
I didn’t tally everything in the news
during my morning brew.
Over 22,000 from drugs or the police.
A billion creatures from forest fires.
Ask me again how I am.

Anna Teresa Slater is a high school teacher from Iloilo, Philippines, and a postgraduate student in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Channel Lit Mag, Shot Glass Journal, The Literary Nest, Door is a Jar, Nightingale & Sparrow, and more, as well as in anthologies by Kasingkasing Press and Hedgehog Poetry Press.