Truck Stop
Marc Isaac Potter
The smoke is rising.
Harold sits
November 12, 1941
Not on the Left Bank in Paris.
Not in a trendy coffee shop.
But rather.
In a truck stop diner
Just outside Huron, Ohio
Routes 2 and 6
Puffing away.
His poem is of love,
Dark shadows,
And bright unredeemable light.
The frigid truck stop diner
Is a family of grease: Crisco,
motor oil, U-joint lubricant,
Transmission oil,
And the laughter of truckers
Who are not heading home.
The Delicious, Thick,
Terrible Coffee
Spills through the pages
of his yellow pad
The truckers give him
the courtesy of
Ignoring him, of pretending to be ignorant of
Poetry anywhere.
Their truck motors hum outside
Staying warm in their iambic pentameter.
Crows defecate in their favorite places:
Windshields and Driver’s seats.
Mildred dumps more coffee in each coffee pitcher
As Bart curses about his load of chickens,
As Our Head Cook Horatio,
Tries to balance two strips of old bacon
On lettuce and tomato.
“Who orders a BLT in a truck stop, For God’s sake?”,
he asks himself.
Harold dissects his BLT
Into its many parts:
He puts the bread naked onto the table,
Puts half a strip of bacon
in his black coffee.
One cycloptic
18-wheeler headlight glares down the
Black lines of his yellow pad.
Two slices of tomato
Two shreds of lettuce
Sit, overlapping,
On a small plate.
Marc Isaac Potter
The smoke is rising.
Harold sits
November 12, 1941
Not on the Left Bank in Paris.
Not in a trendy coffee shop.
But rather.
In a truck stop diner
Just outside Huron, Ohio
Routes 2 and 6
Puffing away.
His poem is of love,
Dark shadows,
And bright unredeemable light.
The frigid truck stop diner
Is a family of grease: Crisco,
motor oil, U-joint lubricant,
Transmission oil,
And the laughter of truckers
Who are not heading home.
The Delicious, Thick,
Terrible Coffee
Spills through the pages
of his yellow pad
The truckers give him
the courtesy of
Ignoring him, of pretending to be ignorant of
Poetry anywhere.
Their truck motors hum outside
Staying warm in their iambic pentameter.
Crows defecate in their favorite places:
Windshields and Driver’s seats.
Mildred dumps more coffee in each coffee pitcher
As Bart curses about his load of chickens,
As Our Head Cook Horatio,
Tries to balance two strips of old bacon
On lettuce and tomato.
“Who orders a BLT in a truck stop, For God’s sake?”,
he asks himself.
Harold dissects his BLT
Into its many parts:
He puts the bread naked onto the table,
Puts half a strip of bacon
in his black coffee.
One cycloptic
18-wheeler headlight glares down the
Black lines of his yellow pad.
Two slices of tomato
Two shreds of lettuce
Sit, overlapping,
On a small plate.
