Breakfast in America
Even in nowhere a diner waits for them. The clink
of porcelain & metal –
Always the waffle iron overflows.
She’d be lying if she said she didn’t miss
the cigarette fog resting above the never empty
coffee carafe, a little extra yellow
in the wallpaper. In every booth
the cracked laminate pinches, over easy
eggs yolk just right, & words fall short of the biscuits
mopping it all up.
Time is stagnant on a flattop. She’s already been here
before & never at all.
His smile on the table, hers in the cup. Their thighs
peel away sticky. Life is something
you eat. She’ll say pit stop as if it’s defeat.
The waitress always calls her sugar & fuck
if that isn’t sweet.
of porcelain & metal –
Always the waffle iron overflows.
She’d be lying if she said she didn’t miss
the cigarette fog resting above the never empty
coffee carafe, a little extra yellow
in the wallpaper. In every booth
the cracked laminate pinches, over easy
eggs yolk just right, & words fall short of the biscuits
mopping it all up.
Time is stagnant on a flattop. She’s already been here
before & never at all.
His smile on the table, hers in the cup. Their thighs
peel away sticky. Life is something
you eat. She’ll say pit stop as if it’s defeat.
The waitress always calls her sugar & fuck
if that isn’t sweet.
Alyssa Beckitt is a PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where her research focuses on the intersections of capitalism and decolonial poetics and their influences on institutions. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her creative work values the power of language to interrogate and critique what it means to be a human existing in late late capitalism. Her work can be found in Four Way Review, Red Rock Review, Signet Magazine, and forthcoming in Feminist Formations, Drunk Monkeys, and BS Lit.
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