The Bob and Mary Diner, New Buffalo, Ohio, 2008
Every succulent sandwich under $4.99
A summer Thursday and Roger Dowell
in overalls and long grey beard sits
hunched at the counter, the village at his back
and, farther off, the long-dead coal field.
For $3.99 the special: fried baloney on grilled white,
home fries, sizzling strips of pepper and onion.
He likes the smells, takes his time,
stares now and then into the kitchen,
where Mary glances toward him
and mumbles something to Janie, her cook.
Whatever Mary said, Roger hears so sad.
And odd? He’s pretty sure. So he digs
in his pocket, finds four wadded bills
to smack on the Formica, wets his napkin,
wipes his fingers and the butter knife,
half-mumbles, half-growls something—
nothing you could call a word—
at nothing Mary knows she said.
He takes a dozen careful steps toward the door,
pauses there, points the dull blade at his ear,
moves it in circles. Against their will, people look.
His daughter’s little house sits two miles north,
near the old Walhonding Mine and Tunnel Hill.
She worries about her father, and debt, and sinkholes,
which the deep coal shafts might have left a century ago.
He heads away from town on the gravel berm,
patches of goldenrod beside him now and then,
and cattails, and some asters, purple and white.
He walks on the left, facing traffic,
as he was taught to do so long ago.
Fabio and the Animals
Blue skies last Thursday along the trail
where a cardinal couple, ten feet up a pine,
fed each other, one seed at a time.
A few yards later a different cardinal
lay in dirt, hawk-shredded, feathers scattered,
while in the budding treetops
the first pair fluted their red love.
In another quarter mile I nearly
stepped on a pair of garter snakes
coiled around each other, writhing
under midday sun. They paused,
raised their heads to scan me
as I hovered over their sex,
which looked like war.
But today’s a lazy Sunday, coffee, the paper,
and YouTube—in Portugal, Fabio, age four,
declines some bites of octopus
his mother’s cut for lunch.
He’s firm. He wants his animals alive!
Wants them standing up!
He raises his hands like a conductor.
Off camera, his mother’s voice
sounds adoring, even teary, as she
grants a lunch of noodles and potatoes,
the souls of which Fabio has not pondered.
But on this dewy morning he makes me
reconsider immortal greens, pasta, beans.
Then I recall the octopus’ serpent legs
surging with murderous speed and grace—
how he pries small creatures from the rocks,
choosing the tasty ones
to crush with his beak, and gobble,
whether or not each shrimp, crab,
or tiny fish has finished his sentence
in an ocean so dark and silent
no one knows just what to say.
The New Neighbor
You know this man: fifty-something, lean,
lives alone, speaks so little, such
grudging helloes, I wonder
if words to him are underwater sounds,
claims of the drowning, or mumbled prayers,
or rattling items in forgotten drawers.
Hands on hips, he studies some storm
that he alone perceives, as men the city hired
repair his sewage line from house to street.
His giant pickup sits white as a bride in the drive.
He’s modified the muffler so he can feel
the rumble of an engine’s speech,
like sounds he heard in youth,
when radio nights of pounding songs buried
the plaintive notes he silently preferred.
In those hills outside of town, narrow roads
curved along the sprawling fields,
and he remembers the smell of peaches.
He never knew the farmer’s name.
John Hazard grew up in the southeastern Ohio village of Caldwell and now lives in Birmingham, Michigan. He has taught at the University of Memphis and, more recently, at the Cranbrook Schools and Oakland University in suburban Detroit. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net and has appeared widely in magazines, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Shenandoah, Slate, The Gettysburg Review, Ascent, Atticus Review (as Featured Poet for January 2020), California Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, Harpur Palate, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His 2015 book of poetry is Naming a Stranger (Aldrich Press). His current manuscript, Interrupt the Sky, needs a publisher.
Header photo by Denise Husted, courtesy Pixabay.
