Waffle House at 8pm in the Carolinas
Everyone’s arguing about something in this Waffle House,
about whether the corned beef is good for anything
or not, or about whether the hiking trail down the road
is really three miles. One guy
says, it’s gotta be longer. I’ve walked five-mile trails
that have felt shorter. And his wife’s
looking resigned, nodding with the air of
someone who’s heard this a couple-and-a-half times
before, eyes on the hashbrowns.
Beside us all, just outside, a doe trapezes into a bush
and if we’d have seen it, we’d wonder
how it bounds into it all without
worrying about getting snagged the way we do,
with our poly-cotton blends, our skin cracking under the
Carolina dry. Well, anyway, eggs are
coming sunny-side up, now. Afterwards,
we’ll all head back to the motel six,
Dream we’re wildebeests,
dipping our heads down in honor
of a water-pool
*
Dim Sum Chicken Feet
As if contemplating the act of mating, there is no way to do this
delicately, I think. No place for
fork-and-knife etiquette between
joints, tactile kind of
indulgence with the lip and tongue— rooting around, slippery muscle
against skin, giving way, sucking
tender matter off the bone. All comes
apart in tendon and avian hardness:
callback to biology class where
finger bones sit as indelicately
in my mouth as does the word
phalange,
all knobby and cloddish:
lean down and spit, lips lacquered with saliva and residue
fit for coagulation, and clink-clink-clink, finger
bones go, ravaged, in my plate to where
they lie, scattered, the picture of a
kill-site of chop-licking
mammal, still-life arrangement in a portfolio
of the grotesque. As if performing the act of
mating, I should be
mortified in this half-foreign
place of too-close claustrophobic round
tables and high-school grease-hair
and uncoordinated side-stepping and cigarette burns in the
sticky-stiff cream-colored
tablecloths and scotch tape disguised as
remedy and hobbling oriental
men fishing God from
between their two front teeth, I
think, but I am not. Feet in little metal dishes find
purchase on too-close tables, curled and
soft and glistening,
docile creature-things. The Japanese man behind
me, all fingers and teeth, bites
that fleshy ball of a chicken’s palm with
zeal. I wipe my mouth in solidarity. We were never meant to be so sanitized.
*
Alyssa Gao is a high schooler hailing from Atlanta. Her work has previously been published by her school’s beloved literary arts magazine, Silent Voices, and has been recognized by the National Scholastic Press Association.
