The speaker presents a calm, ordinary face to the world: a placid, pink-lipped woman in a polyester shirt, drinking coffee in a café. Underneath, she says, lives Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, hung with skulls and ready to burst out. The poem imagines what that might look like: smashed cups, broken doors, a wild dance down the road, a man throttled over his tea.
The contrast is the heart of it. The outer self is small, beige, and "polite," even reduced to a "mouth hole," while the inner self is huge, bloody, and loud. The speaker seems to feel squeezed by the role of the respectable "matron," and her suppressed rage is close to the surface. Some days the coffee tastes like blood.
The mood is tense and darkly funny, with a thrill of danger. The ending, a shriek that could shatter every glass in town, leaves the threat hanging in the air.