DINNER AS ADULTS
Now missing a link that frays the power line, I am no longer in range of your life,
I am tied onto a satellite uncle.
At work, entire discussions about the spelling of nicknames. Internal family logics cypher through
periodicals, whole infrastructures of provenance resting on the possible presence of a second “b.”
And if the point of all this was really imitation, then why did all families seem to fail so spectacularly?
We’ll meet again at a restaurant in Little Italy that you remember—one of the few still around from
that time. Something about it reminds you of the heated smiles that came off women in your youth.
Our simile is a daily one—beer fizzing in its pint glass as pure as any recollection of love. You may
cry at how different things are— some part of you remembers a song that always seemed to be
playing
following you place to place. Out thick smoke of the restaurant into the daylight of the city, into the
cab, your apartment, making endless sense for you. Now there is no song, not even an archway or a
door-lined hallway
as had been promised by all those cumulating events—all the formations of life that poured down
like mineral deposits over your warm body. Least of all, no queuing aisle of voluptuous cheerleaders.
The name doesn’t even sound right, the one you’d been given.
You falter, you fall, and it comes loose.
MODERN PAINTERS
It is not always easy to determine where the language stops and the thought begins.
The hail came as we were still in the restaurant, so only the smokers saw it
catching on their hair like shards of salt.
The bartender held a camera to a screen
showing a deadly wave; the wave filled
the camera’s smaller screen and so would appear real
to whoever received that rendition.
I was eager to get home and finish what I’d been watching.
Experts were producing perfectly articulated
compound words: background, foreground, chestnut,
commonwealth, beach body, blueberry, candlestick—
My sense of good is becoming increasingly encrypted.
I keep speaking before I know what I’m going to say
ordering sodas I don’t want, champagnes, antique
handplanes strobing before me like
burning messages of prophecy.
On Sundays, I like to be up to hear the church bells
but dinner went late. Long stretches between courses
created a sense of dimensionality. I can’t remember
feeling hungry. What feeling hungry feels like.
I’d like to be prepared for any reality
like how David always gets away
with just bringing fruit from his farm.
Sallie Fullerton is a writer living in Hudson, New York. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yale Review, Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, mercury firs. Literary Hub, Pioneer Works Broadcast, among other publications, and was anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles. Their first book, Baby Face/Face de bébé came out this May through Invisible Books.