In an Early Morning Diner

Could you bring your conversation closer?
I’m having trouble hearing what you’re saying,
and it’s much more interesting than what this fly has told me
of your jam-stained biscuit,
or that man’s three-egg omelet,
or my syrupy flapjacks (do people still say flapjacks?),
or how morning sunbeams taste on that grimy windowsill.

Maybe I should be choosier about my breakfast companions,
but I have been coming to this same diner for more than thirty years,
and it is the last place my wife and I ate together.
I keep expecting her ghost to take the seat
across from me
and remind me to sit up straight.

Or perhaps I am hoping these fatty strips of bacon
will stop my heart,
the way they probably stopped hers,
and I could find my wife again…
unless you think she is already here,
buzzing on the rim of that woman’s coffee cup,
strolling in the pink lipstick she liked to wear.

🙑

"In an Early Morning Diner" was written by David Edwards, an adult in the Kenosha area. 

While we received close to 2 dozen submissions from adults, our judges ultimately rallied around David's poem as their favorite.  Jean Preston, Kenosha Poet Laureate 2014-15, said, "I love that the title begins the story. A unique voice and setting to address a universal theme - grief." She felt that the poem featured "very compelling images" and that the poem's close "is particularly well done."