Plato's Diner
by Jenn Brown


After three a.m., it's the man in puffed
rainbow sleeves and his drag-queen
friends in a booth, back from a strobe-lit club
where it's not March, but a seasonless country
that daily turns its immigrants out
to the fluorescent light of breakfasts--
and it's college girls ordering coffee,
in jeans too snug for anything else, whose eyes
follow everyone who leaves.
______________I've ordered
a huge omelet: canned mushroom, spinach,
cracked Greek olives bitter and briny as loss--
the taste of dying of thirst, but I don't want
water, anything, yet--. Salt cured, this meal
chokes me, then its shadow sweetens my tongue.






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