Fast Food Poets and Anti-Poets

Alexandra Burack

I’m top sirloin, baby the guy in a red baseball cap boasts, waggling his steak&egg wrap toward Rose, who’s hunched against my shoulder till the rime of winter morning drips from/her hair. She side-darts roiled eyes to the plastic fork dispenser, primed to ward off the lie. My reflection in the cheesy-art mirror behind her recalls the less fat-marbled line I bought in another speedy-meal palace, dwindling the way of women whose left atria are reserved for deceit (fellow writers never fib, unlike abaft misogynists stalking already at 8 a.m.). I muse how discernment is discarded—stale, dank, and mold-pocked, like doughnuts remaindered to slush-iced asphalt for parking lot pigeons, lucky in trash-mired snow. Choice meat all around; even jackals have souls. A pack of truants invades, howling we want our coffee now, bitches!  I revere the simmered rage in women’s guts, enclose the safe hunger of the hunted under my dura before the trudge against sudden sleet that pollinates the street, this domesticated street, a bordered pasture of aimless entreaties.