All Night Waitress
Just her and me: she sits with her legs
twined ankle to knee, her hand
hiding the bruises
on her cheek. She dangles car keys as if thinking
about escape to some otherwhere without these islands
of formica tabletops afloat in the neon Sargasso Sea
of two a.m. where I eat as quietly as I can,
not wanting to disturb her privacy
after she set down gently my cherry pie
and retreated back to the farthest table.
The jut of her jaw multiplied in every pane
sets night’s teeth on edge
in the doppler whine
of truck tires fading far away.
Here be monsters wrote the ancient mapmakers
at the edges of the unknown world,
inking in rumored creatures
with giant razor teeth, nightmare heads and bodies.
And here be glass sugar pourers, napkin dispensers, salt and pepper shakers floating,
floating as if gravity had finally given up, each of us no longer
nailed to lives that, as we drift away, keep going on without us.
Do her bruises still radiate their tender heat?
How edgy things get, every thought sliced so fine…
“Have a nice night,” she says, as I say it back, pay,
and walk out to the parking lot.
Back on the road in the insect dark,
giant serpents with lion claws hold up mirrors
as they rear above the dawn, eyes squinting
at their own faces which don’t look monstrous, just sad.
Tom Sleigh’s many books include the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize winner, The King’s Touch, House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed, and Army Cats, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent book of essays is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees, which recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and East Africa. His awards include a Guggenheim, two NEA grants, Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award, and both the Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in Raritan, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny, Poetry, Metropolitan Review and many other magazines. His memoir, Rosie: A Memoir of Farewell, will be published on May 5th. And his new and selected poems, Some of What We Talked About, will appear in 2027. A Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) at Hunter College, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.