So here’s to all those pretty waitresses you’d break up over
who don’t really want to be
waitresses. You inchling! I over-tip three soggy dollars
and some silver and you’d think I’d screwed
an archduke’s monocle into my watery left squint, slapped
my thigh with an ivory walking stick
and strode forth in jodhpurs from the foxed
crosshatching and curlicues of an old English copperplate…
Toff! Blabbermouth! I sneeze green into a monogrammed
sky-blue handkerchief and elucidate my sorries over
another all-American soundtrack. Bankrupt infrastructure
crumbles over the bones of Potawatomi, Miami
and Shawnee. For rent. For sale. For rent…
The St. Mary’s River runs yellowy-brown, frothed around
fallen timbers, castoff bricks and the bent
forks from the stripped and partially submerged carcasses
of stolen bicycles. Here muskrats plash their murky hithers
and thithers. A gargantuan carp rolls to the surface
and gulps the mosquitoey air. Almost nothing
bears remembering, but she was born here, so poor old Carole
Lombard’s forever stuck like the rest of us on the damp concrete
span of it, stuck with the hiss-hiss of the cars going
wherever they go crossing the Carole Lombard Memorial Bridge.