Poem: I Have Been to America's Drive-in

For election day, an American poem...



I Have Been to America’s Drive-in

I have sat in the world’s laziest restaurant
and leaned out of the car,
Jane’s Addiction barking on the speaker overhead.
I have pushed the one giant button
and pushed in my card
and thanked the boy on roller skates
who handed me a bag and drink,
his face incongruously happy in the rain.

I have smelled the warm-baked lust
of hamburger buns, licked
dripped mustard off the heel of my hand
while watching the movie of strip-mall traffic,
Jeeps and pickups and SUVs
accelerating through their days,
the orange-and-blue balloons
of the AT&T store
waving wet over a tea of autumn leaves.

I have taken a bite of burger
and glimpsed a holocaust of cattle,
seen them reduced to bullets
in a twenty-pound PetSmart bag
slung in the back seat
of an ’88 Mazda.
I have seen the redneck men
in T-shirts stuck with rain
drop their bottles
in the trash can decked
with national-park pebbles.

I have plunged the red straw
into a Diet Coke and tasted
cinnamon and baseball,
sat with a plexiglass menu
between me and someone else
I could not see
until she backed out
and set her car on a course toward west
past the giant insistent signs
telling her the thousand things
she had to do
before dinner
and home
and love.



(appeared in The Whistling Fire)


Posted for dVerse Poets Pub OpenLinkNight #69.
(Hello, DVerse poets!)