With a final line from Blake
I turn on the radio and
hear trumpets and here’s
Raul Esparza all marry me
a little, love me just
enough, and sweetly
I slip out the bathroom
window and into my tidy
little car on the street which is
a femoral artery to a formerly bad
part of town where the mortuary
at the tippy-top of the city
had been turned into a restaurant
some summers ago and everyone is delighted
to pay twenty or thirty dollars for their tiny plates,
and so sick with longing am I I parallel
park and climb the street like a ladder.
Hello hello, and I wait for a table. Outside,
people are standing in line for ice cream
and waffle cones for their ice cream
and I can smell it all and I ask for a newspaper
while I wait but oh no there’s no news
anymore, not for a long time. Well
some music, then. We can have
all the music we want. I’m seated
at last, and all the waiting over,
made to drink water from a pale blue
mason jar by an open second-story
window. I’m pleased by the heavy
cream-colored recycled paper menus
and the sans-serif font which everywhere
adorns them and I ask the waiter
where is all the food on the menu,
anyways? She is older than me her
eyes two too-warm chocolate wafers, and she
asks me what would eating be for. I say fair,
but why the restaurant and she says we like
the real estate. And what a nice view,
she says, that trusty white-steel bridge
stretching its young body over Cherry Creek,
and how fine the spindles of its great back
up and away from heaven, and I ask her
what are they waiting for down there anyway,
and we lean out the window to see
the people waiting between
the great many Amazon Prime
boxes which have been made the lungs
of our city. What are they waiting for, the sun
isn’t even hot today, it’s just bright.
She refills my mason jar and she tells me
they just like waiting, and at my table
she lights a candle in the sunshine.

Originally from Colorado, Katana Smith is a poet living, working, and studying in Galesburg, a town in western Illinois, where she is an undergraduate at Knox College.