Rebecca Schumejda

Nighthawks at the Diner

With Respect to Tom Waits

I’ve served eggs just the way you like them

sausage and chili in a bowl, hamburgers

and fries, and a buttered roll to women

who were men, who only wanted coitus

at 2am in a diner near a thruway exit just

to make rent. I told a toothless man,

who was always a man without a woman,

without lipstick, just yolk applied thicker

than the grim on the kitchen floor,

that someone would take him home someday

after he used his fork to lift my skirt.

Hopper wouldn’t paint this scene portraying

long-winged American goatsuckers tapping

anxiously at their empty coffee mugs.

Everyone wants desperately on late night shifts.

I want you to know I never ate sausage or eggs

in the walk-in, no matter how many times

I was asked by a man who wanted to be a man

or a woman who wanted to be a man or

a man who was a woman. But once startled,

I dropped a lit joint into a vat of pickled eggs

and always wondered If anyone ever found it.

Rebecca Schumejda is the author of Waiting at the Dead End Diner (Bottom Dog Press, 2014), Cadillac Men (NYQ Books, 2012), Falling Forward, (sunnyoutside, 2009); and several chapbooks. She received her MA in Poetics and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. www.rebeccaschumejda.com