top of page

Poetry

The Suburban Strip Mall Barbeque Restaurant Queen

You called me last night and the clock on my computer screen said 00:13
because I live in Europe now, and I’ve learned the eloquence of the 24-hour elites.
I paused Vanderpump Rules and hid under my covers and reluctantly whispered my greeting
because I didn’t want to wake my flatmates.

The flatmates flit and frowned at that very same evening’s 6 p.m. dinnertime when they spilled
their grocery totes all over the kitchen table.
Tumbling tomatoes, gem lettuce, what an appropriate name, organic shampoo for later.
They rolled their eyes with their ferocious sighs. “You
won’t believe the smell on the commute
No way can you trust the secretary with such lip filler we
need to hoover more this place is rancid they
need to learn how to send an email correctly.”
I bit down onto the bread Allie gave me and was too preoccupied with the crumbs filling my mouth to respond.
This one was seeded and paired well with the salmon I had scraped off the
expired bagel at the restaurant
where I finally landed a job
and thus regular expiration-dated dinners.
Allie and I had laughed when we discovered she delivers her pastries there.
Until I got this gig, I had been out of permanent work for four months.
My stomach was louder than my response to my housemates. It growled.

So I hid under my covers when you called because I was worried one particular flatmate would hear
because after she flashed her teeth over her bag of emerald greens
she said she’s woken up at night whenever I’ve walked to the bathroom.
She’s had a hard time lately
so after her bubble bath
she’s getting an early night
and please can I be considerate and quiet.

So I ducked under my sheets in the dark and thought oh no oh no,
please don’t let me be a bitch to my flatmate, as I said hello
and I heard tears in your eyes
as you said you missed me so
then continued about your latest song you learned on the dulcimer
until you asked me if I could please come home in November.
I could not respond.
My bank account hit the 001 mark when I quit my job this past winter.

I tell people I left that cafe because the work was monotonous, haunting sandpit melting velcro sneaker squeaking asylum white insane (not to be dramatic).
With cupware stacks salivating and customers' eyes squinching at me when they didn’t want to gawk. Waiting for their 5-pound latte.
But really it was because of the way
my 21-year-old manager Amy talked to me.
Before she went on vacation to her family’s third home in some beachside town in France,
I had called out croissant! In a waxy paper bag and handed it to a customer.
“Fold it smoother next time also wash the dishes turn off the tap sweep the floor move the boxes 18-minute break because 2 is for meal prep we allow you to take whatever food you want for it.”
These are all well and true
except I wasn’t the culprit,
it was Jenny or Ingrid but they ignored Amy as they flirted with the boys
who befriended me
especially Harry
who acted working class and hid the fact he had a girlfriend
he’d met 8 years ago at boarding school in Eastbourne.
So Jenny and Ingrid purposefully discluded me and Amy. So they could be the stars of the show.
But they don’t know… I am the suburban strip mall barbeque restaurant queen…
“Close the shutters that bread’s too burnt too brown too wrinkled too sweet too flirtatious
stop making eye contact you’re looking for it you’re bragging —”
I averted my gaze and crouched and cleaned the cupboard.

When Harry and I finally fucked,
he quit the next day
and suddenly Amy, Ingrid, and Jenny all liked me.
I put my hoodie on and googled him
for weeks.

I was wearing that hoodie the night you called
and told me you’ve got a new job now in a bakery too.
It’s only part-time but that’s just fine
the only difficulty is you actually need to work more slowly.
It’s been two months since the factory closed.

My forehead relaxed and my eyebrows lowered with a sunken fleece smile
and I breathed.

But after Amy, no Jenny, no Harry, because the source is always further away,
I decided to quit that minimum-wage scumbag job
and landed some temp work at a new cafe,
with a boy who asked me how I could know who I am so easily.
I had dirt in my nailbeds and
split ends reaching down my spine
that streaked because my bills were due, and replied,
“You find it when you have no one to rely on.”
But that’s not true;
growing up, I had you, and
you showed me how to treat words like they’re platinum.
To find, to alight, your string-plucked song
that belongs in the ears of others.
That you reenact in your assembly line tracks
As you call the conveyor belt neighbor your brother.
Instead, maybe, when no one’s like you,
you have to forge your own crown
because they already attempted to revoke it.
But I looked at the boy who’s parents themselves owned a bakery chain
and thought how sad it is to also have never needed
to find that shovel.

I dig the shovel into the earth,
it’s gravel, I found,
easy to scramble. I heave
with sweat through my piss-stained jeans
and wish my feet weren’t stuck in molasses,
in fractures, in ruptures, like the working class spleen,
my shovel a spade in a deck of cards
As I look for the queen

The shovel in my dream somehow flips when I pull away
and it turns out I had been digging into my own dirt-filled chest each working day.
I see it in my mind’s eye.
I am lighter now.


After my month-long temp job ended with no positions available to me, sorry,
they liked my work ethic though,
a shame to see me go,
then I waited tables at two different diners where the managers,
with their identical products yet competing prices,
both screamed.
“Don’t you know what you’re doing
why do things always go wrong around you,”
they spat and salivated on me — I had only been working there for a day or two.
And I responded before I was fired,
“Don’t you know that I am the suburban strip mall barbeque restaurant queen.”
I’ve been bussing tables since I was 16
Been called a skank and a whore by middle-aged men asking for steak and soup and whatever more
With plates of fries and ketchup as they drool not at the food
but at the little working service girl lifting a tray,
My back a skank’s antonymous plank
because I was practicing to walk like a princess.

Things go wrong while I avert my gaze and stare at the register’s screen
because I am a girl and people think about sex when they ask me for coffee and cream
or nuts
or juice squirting from a sugar-sweet nozzle…
I’m hired to win a contest of identical prices
a game so stupid I’m actually boggled
and everyone’s mad that they put me in a wet t-shirt to attract more buyers. No.
I walk in choosing to also wear a crown
that matches my transparent shirt and shovel
because I am the suburban strip mall barbeque restaurant queen,
Who has torn at that parking lot, pitching its crumbling gravel.
I’ve just been gone from the Midwest for too long.
I did not apply for a European wet-t-shirt contest
I really just want to dig some fucking holes
listen to some acoustic music
chill the fuck out

but Amy yells at me for dancing
but I know that this is because Jenny had left her out
and at 21 she really just wanted to be included
under the spit of the hose
but when she has access to new clothes and another vacation home
with her family in France, all she knows
is to lash out because what I have she can’t just ask for,
and she knows she wants more.

Well as a young girl I sat by myself in my Cap’n Crunch tower
my plastic spoon throne,
before I ever grew into needing that jewel-spat shovel,
my morning walks to school alone
but you had wished me off with my belly full as you sat by the TV
and I created my own decrees.

Onto my dissolute rusty 2003 Corolla dreams
the gas station supermodels governed in plaster
the beer bottle showgirls sliced in half
the machine gun politician-slash-actor
the billboards reflecting the sun on my 4 p.m. commute to work
saying 1-800-REPENT.

I am the silicon strip mall Midwestern queen
from the echoing chambers of a pyramid scheme
and you never tried to be a god preaching blasphemy
at the highways. Not the spiteful fists
punching the cracked toll station glass when they disagree.
I mean, you only treated your fellow shoddy workers with humility.

You sang your songs into the basement yourself
so not to bother me
to not ever wake or startle; to let me get on with my day,
after your 7-3s your 8-7s, your shifts that are made to intake
and offer nothing left. Well you released your mandolin cry
your unintentional dulcimer lullaby,
the important sounds and sights you taught me outside the assembly line
until I was old enough to join it,
rat race,
cash tips in hand,
you welcomed me,
you quietly called me hey honey bean.



I’m away now though and I mean, this past weekend I was walking through Battersea,
because I’m your I-97 princess on the rubble foot run.
Lilli walked beside me and I thanked them for having given me that job alongside them as a cleaner while I was desperate and in between.
They had taught me how to scrub the hospital sinks with bleach
as my nailbeds dried and blood on the back of my hand’s skin seeped;
they carry out hazardous waste bins on Wednesdays, but “don’t worry,” they smiled, “you won’t have to do that.”

Lilli told me about the top surgery they want to achieve
but that’s 6 grand and we both knew how it felt to be paid our night’s work with a 50.
Bottom surgery’s 30k,
and we stared at the towering flats in crooked intervals for style’s sake, and I said,
“You will find a way to do that.”

Then this guy walked past whom I had stalked online
‘cause he was this blond-haired boarding school brat
I had once so desperately wanted to fit in with.

I touched shoulders with Lilli and pointed
but then offered them one of Allie’s loaves of bread carried with me in my bag
The next day I’d have to go to work at the restaurant I had finally found
having left the cafe, like what you do now,
I would be shoveling asphalt all evening

Lilli had to be up at 6 to clean

I hid for your call

I bussed to get here

I’ve become friends with the scoundrels
the meat
the crumbs
the scavengers —
Lilli found their shirt they wore that day abandoned in the trash
by one of the companies they clean —
somehow they recognize my faraway kingdom,
that of the suburban strip mall barbeque restaurant queen.

A new home new country new work now, sure, but
I slap my sloppy bills at the bank,
the minimum spree,
the provisional pound,
as I somehow make poetry.

That guy we passed, he’s a musician, I had seen,
with thousands of store-bought sound-teched streams but I,
I, am the undisputed yet departed suburban strip mall barbeque restaurant queen

and I make Solomon decrees
I shout into Battersea
with Lilli giving me time and money and shared company.

Friend-bought drinks no questions asked,
bottles pulled from the bread bag then cracked
open with a lighter. Sourdough delivered to my bell-less home
My friend got evicted she slept in my bed
My friend quit her job I bought her an Old Fashioned
I lost my job my friend gave me a sausage roll
We trade pints for coffees as the cameras record,
cementing the secret acts. The bread was delivered silently to my door.
I know how to have this ‘cause whenever I can, I return the same
I learned because you always called me at what felt like my inescapable midnight.

But also at 6 a.m. packing my lunches,
8 p.m. picking me up from community dance practices,
when you’d encourage my limelight.
The ear the whisper the tear, how I wish I could come home in November.
But I’m in Europe now counting my cash, my 10th job placement since January,
it’s spring now,
my straightening spine supporting my suburban strip mall barbeque restaurant delivery.

I fall into my mind’s eye
I trip into the quicksand grip
But what I thought put me there instead is the very hand that pulls me out,
as I scream kicking. I slip
into the empty cavern trance
the pathfinder search
the longest rustbelt salmon scraps
the 1990s worksheets used to clock in and out of poverty
and I realize, actually,
what was the only thing to get me out of it:
you taught me to get out of it
with your 8-to-midnight dulcimer song.
I removed my head from my bedsheets,
my laptop light still flickered.

 

Poetry in the form of Journal Entries

cropped 4_edited.jpg
Cropped 6_edited_edited_edited.jpg
Cropped 9_edited_edited_edited.jpg
cropped 11_edited_edited.jpg
cropped 18_edited.jpg
Cropped 20_2_edited_edited.jpg
bottom of page