ManicDDaily

Unnatural

We scoured the waterfront, the next morning, for eggs,
the fried kind with a crenellated coast,
only that city had been recently re-veined,
the harbor hemmed by chains, as in
where everything’s the same,
and, too weak to walk any farther, we wandered at last
into a pinkish franchise
not because it had a name we recognized
but because there was no where else
for the unwheeled,
and when I was handed something brown
around a  “beware it’s hot” hockey puck,
my hungry face cried “what the —–   (let’s call it–“yuck”)
and the guy, whose striped shirt sensed
my discomfiture, replied, “we only have scrambled,”
and I managed, “but it’s square,”
and he smiled, “isn’t that neat?”

So, I did not bother to say, “and it bounces,”
or
“you call this,” pressing the puff,
“a bagel?”

Only vowed to better love New York City, my then
home, dingy to its very piers, but at least a place that knew
bagels and sported on every corner
eggs fried into whatever shape
their whites might flow.

But the truth is that this is just the middle
of this story, which is perhaps why the square egg
seemed horrible to me in a way I am not
conveying–
the part I didn’t tell you
was how the night before
a very old young friend, welcoming us to the hotel’s
banquet room, edged along the skirted tablecloths
on the outsides of sliver slippers, the chemo having burned
the bottoms of
her feet, which may be why
the idea of anything at wrong right angles and
heated some strange hot–
the idea of anything so very not
what it was supposed to be–
just didn’t sit well with me.

Maybe I should tell you the end
of the story too, though I suspect you’ve already
guessed it, and yes,
is all I can stand to say anyway,
even as everything else inside me
still cries, no.

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Here’s a drafty poem for my prompt on With Real Toads to write about dining out in some form.  The pic is one from the prompt–I appreciate that it does not show a bagel!