The girl outside Dennys is younger than you
when you first slept curled up in the front seat of your car
and woke with a headache and heartache and a crick in the neck.
She’s pretty in the way all sad women are,
untouchable. Enigmatic. Backlit by dull yellow, almost
indistinguishable from the patrons’ silhouettes.
You want to make her smile,
but smiles come with all manner of obligations:
You’d have to ask her if her mother knows
where her daughter is tonight,
have to ask her if she wants to stay the night somewhere
warm, and safe. You’d have to feed her
twice, at least, which is a couple bucks if you’re cheap –
which you are, but not for her, if you must. So, five, ten, maybe.
And, if she’s lost,
the fare for her bus ticket home, and with it
the cost of knowing some other castaway soul
has a shore they can lay anchor before,
knowing someone has a family whose relief
would drown them. No – buoy them.
You know what really drowns people.
She lights another cigarette. You do the math.
How much it cost her; how much it will cost you.
How much money you might spend, worst case scenario.
If she has a baby –
If she has an infirm grandmother –
You can’t take care of the world.
Even if you could, who’d want to? It’s never
done anything for you.
You tell yourself, turn the key.
You tell yourself, drive away.
You are full, tonight, and have a warm motel room,
and a scratch ticket that might make you a thousand,
might make you nothing.
You tell yourself all sorts of things,
and then you flip down your visor, to remember
just how sharp loneliness is between the ribs,
and you step out into the cold night,
and the dull yellow light,
and you say, with only a little reticence,
“What’s a girl like you doing in a dump like this?”