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.
