In Starbucks on My Thirty
I.
I don’t mean to be crass
but these dark chocolate
peanut butter cups taste
really fucking good.
Last night I ate too many
movie theater Swedish Fish
and the difference this morning
impresses itself upon me.
I get a little weepy
thinking about it, actually,
although that may
have more to do with poor K.
face-diving
onto the express lanes
last week
or G.’s cancer
or the general, tawdry
fucked-up state of things.
Last week, I started reading poems
again, which I take
to be a good sign.
At their best, poems stir things
in me, which is better, I feel,
than walking around dead.
Mostly these days, I find
myself taking care of business
which is fine—
I spent a long time
getting up late
and walking around thinking
about what I was going to make
myself for lunch.
Fifteen minutes ago, I sat down.
Fifteen minutes from now,
I have to go back
to work, less than that, even,
if I don’t want to be late.
I don’t not want to be late
but I don’t want another
attendance point, either,
which is the whole purpose
of the system, I guess,
motivating you with fear.
It doesn’t feel like fear
when I’m at work, though.
It feels like a manager’s wink.
Like, “Hey, buddy.
Would you mind
picking that piece of trash
up off the floor?”
I remember Adorno’s idea
about pop culture, how fans don’t understand
that they are enjoying the sound
of their own alienation
reflected back at them.
T., over in Bakery,
likes that idea, too.
II.
Likes that idea, too,
but to what extent
I don’t know
since I have only begun
to get to know him
as I have only begun
to know nearly everyone
who I think I know,
even you, dear reader, who I imagine
surrounded by strangers
who you believe are unlike you.
I am wary of the individual.
I am wary of the individual
yet I recognize the importance
of two hands and one heart,
of ankles that swell
and a stomach that burns.
When I lay my hand down on
my wife’s thigh at night,
I don’t always picture the chickens
that have been left too long
in the deli hot case,
but sometimes I do.
The truth is that I take satisfaction
in breaking down
those broken birds,
that I feel affinity
for the carcasses
that have been consigned
to my care.
At home, I tell my vegetarian friends
that I admire them,
and I do, I think, sneaking mouthfuls
of boiled bird
from the walk-in freezer.
I am a dissolute
and undisciplined creature,
but I harbor no illusions
that I am alone.
III.
No illusions
that I am alone
in Starbucks on my thirty
writing on the back
of a brown pastry bag
given to me by a barista
who was oddly quiet for this Starbucks
when he turned his back on me
to pour my small, dark drip.
Would it be too much to say
that I felt for him a kinship?
Would it be unreasonable to think
that I experienced his emotions
as my own?
When he turned to me
his face was pale,
the paleness of horror
but also light.
IV.
The paleness of horror
but also light,
I think in Starbucks again
on my thirty,
the barista from last week
fired or dead
or on his day off at home,
earbuds plugging his head.
Yesterday I found out that G. died
on my fifteen and was not prepared
for the sadness that pinned my shoulders back,
held them there like a mental patient’s straitjacket.
All around me my co-workers chatted and snacked
and played card games on their phones.
I thought of how little I knew of them
despite all of the time that we spent together
and there was further sadness in that—
the notion that if I were to speak then
I would have had nothing to say.
I closed my eyes and was a child again
over at G.’s house for dinner, the table
set and spread.
Lonely, aggrieved men
shivered their thoughts
through the speakers.
My parents and their friends
nodded their heads.
How miraculous,
how unimaginable, nearly,
to have been a child
who believed that laughter
and communal feeling
were human beings’ natural state.
Alex Gallo-Brown
Alex Gallo-Brown is a writer, educator, and labor organizer from Seattle. He is the author of The Language of Grief (2012), a collection of poems, and Variations of Labor (Chin Music Press, 2019), a collection of poems and stories. He lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter.