Issue #55, May 2001

Certain mornings we'd have to leave her apartment early,
so while she rushed off to work & her real life
I'd head to the diner up the street, sprawl
in a window booth & stuff my face. I loved & was loved

to the exclusion of all else. On those mornings,
snow swirled across the parking lot in blue,
early winter light, a detail I liked so much

that even now my memory is pretending
it was like that everyday.

But there was just that one morning, really:
seagulls circled the parking lot's twin green dumpsters
while I tried to figure out why they didn't fly off

& leave those landlocked leftovers behind to take a chance
at finding the real deal — salt water & shellfish aplenty.
I felt sure they must instinctively know how to get home
& where to find food, but maybe when they looked at
that garbage

they saw a smorgasbord; maybe they thought
they already had everything they could ever want.

Nathan Pritts is a contributor to Bad Subjects.