AMERICAN BREAKFAST

AMERICAN BREAKFAST

BY ROSS BERMAN

American Breakfast.

Steak and eggs.

Golden Nugget.

Small tomato juice, never had, new world.

I believe in the enemy of my enemy.

I believe in the sun in my eyes.

I believe we are wild creatures.

Desirers of impact and shakers of trees.

Shakers of trees, hacking at bark and stripping our souls.

The twisted metal and jagged brick inlays, layered, tempestuous, stuck and sturdy.

Cold, hard and porous, bricks are bone and steel is cartilage.

Make me glass, transparent and fragile.

American Breakfast.

Low grade beef and river rapid yolks.

Corner booth, on the side.

Where did you go, Extraordinary?

Rise and fall, tempestuous brick, timeline, LED, beeps in a voicemail, concurrent,

cold, hard and porous.

The twisted metal and plywood windows.

American Breakfast.

Red meat and sunny potential.

Paddy fried ‘tatoes.

Snuck some tabasco in my tomato juice, burned my lips on the new world

and stuck back with water.

Square one, chewing ice and 50s diet.

Late night.

Corner booth, on the side.

American Breakfast.

Cigarettes and Dopamine and lights and sounds and glass and steel and vicious, vicious brick.

New brick.

New brick doesn't have any of the jagged fun, Extraordinary.

All neat and tidy, white bread and water.

American Breakfast.

Newspaper stained fingers forking flesh and membrane freely.

Corner booth, on the side.

Track mark chips in the tines of Tonto's spear.

Mississippi River.

Grape jelly.

Tabasco and salt and butter and heavy metals.

Chemically fresh and tap water pure.

It hasn't been hot, Extraordinary.

Cooled down before I fried up

brown and sweaty.

American Breakfast.

American Beauty.

Where did you go, American Dream?

Tabasco tomato juice, I will burn away until I've seared you from my lips, Extraordinary.

Where did you go?

I lost you to Chinatown.

Sections of brick and jade with black tar cement, cooking up an escape.

Why did I stay in America?

Where's the chance, Extraordinary?

I had one, now it's gone.

American Breakfast.

Table scraps and rogue potatoes.

Jagged fun, I wanted jagged fun.

Welcome to neat-laid brick, fluff cement and wrought iron wrapping and framing and majesty.

American Breakfast.

Mack truck reality, crumbling marble and red mountains.

Peak and valley and peak and valley.

Tabasco tomato, WE DON’T HAVE LEMON.

We have sandcastles and snowmen, chewing ice because shape counts for shit.

Extraordinary, I called you the Extraordinary Girl.

Fireworks are just cinders that put on a show before they rain back to earth,

sprinkling dust and smoke and ash in your eyes, like early spring in some Lynch nightmare.

It's the heat, darling.

Tagging toes and sweating hogs.

Fever chills and cold showers.

WAKE UP.

American Breakfast.

It's all hearty and earthy and charred and tough and leaky, get yours now.