Elegy For a Used-Car Salesman
You tell me you’re having a good month
without telling me you’re having a good month.
Sunday morning out at Denny’s. Just you & me.
You’re wearing the black polo with the piping.
Everyone knows your name.
You know the waitresses’ names.
Get whatever you want.
I’ll have what you’re having,
the only 13-year-old with a plate
of Egg Beaters & chicken-fried steak.
We cheer our bottomless coffees,
thick with Sweet‘N Low, drowned in cream.
Do you want to know my secret?
Give me your greatest hits.
You extend your hand. I extend mine.
You look me dead in the eye.
It starts with how you start.
A limp-dick handshake? That’s no way to sell a car.
Give ‘em one of these. One pump.
& another. Two. No more. No less.
Have mints. No gum.
Toothpicks at the ready.
Say your name. Ask them theirs.
I say my name. I say yours.
Say they deserve it.
Give them permission.
You’re not selling a Toyota. You’re selling the asphalt,
the sky, the chance to do it all over.
I say it: you deserved that
& more.
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Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of Dead Chicano Mixtape (Red Hen Press, 2027) & A Grito Contest in the Afterlife (Catamaran, 2022), winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize as selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter & Pleiades. He lives in White Center, WA.
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