Lunch Effects

by Isabel Joshlin Glaser

 

Noon in July, and we lunch at Melfi's
where plastic flamingos parade across the roof
and all cars have been abandoned
in the treeless desert of the parking lot.
We choose an upholstered booth and sit,
sipping from icy globes of golden Miller.
A mound of red strips and cellophane accumulates.
Never before have crackers tasted so delicious,
and never before has Joe seemed so nearly-handsome
as in this flickering of shadows and light.

Here we await the "House Special"
served in refrigerated bowls rubbed with garlic--
a shrimp and potato salad, cold,
pierced with bits of blue cheese…
laced with slivers of garlic…
trickled with traces of garlic dressing…
and, somewhere down inside the lettuce…
showered ever so delicately with garlic, grated.
We order seconds and talk about unimportant things.
Never before have small matters demanded such intensity.
We lose ourselves, each in the other's eyes.

As soon as we step outside again,
the sun, powering up, leaves us gasping.
Like a magnet, our car draws its demon flames
as we circle out and head back to Peabody College,
where for two whole days, anyone approaching
either of us, moves suddenly away.
Never before have out lives been so solitary.
An aura of heat and garlic surrounds us
and cancels any possibility of vampires.
For two whole days at least, the campus is free
of such fangs--as free as Joe and I will be
when we go our separate ways at summer's end.

 

© 2005 Isabel Joshlin Glaser

Isabel Joshlin Glaser (The Poet Laureate, Memory, Lunch Effects) is a former elementary school and high school teacher (English and Spanish). A writer of both poetry and prose for children and adults, she is the author of Dreams of Glory: Poems Starring Girls (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster) and Old Visions...New Dreams (Old Hickory Press). Her work has been published in Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Voices in Every Direction, Tennessee Voices, Cricket, Cicada, School Magazine (NSW, Australia), Instructor, Highlights , in many anthologies, textbooks and education programs. She won Memphis Magazine Fiction Prizes in 1992 and in 1994 (for "The Poet Laureate").