number 26

food & thought
They'd redone the floors (new tile) and the booths (new, unfinished plywood), but the mexican food was still thin, cheap and crap but me and my friend crammed the stale chips and watery salsa down anyway with a room full of college kids chugging beers and screaming about, well, everything, and in the middle of that it hit me that I'd asked God for something and he'd answered because the whole time we were with the men at the center tonight, I didn't think about the goddess siren from the coffee shop not one time, and my friend said "Hey, neither did I..." and we clinked glasses and thanked Jesus and went back to our dishes soaked and skinned with badly melted cheese, and it was then that thoughts of her, long-haired and quite blonde and walking by our small table with our bibles and mouths open -- those thoughts returned in a flood that covered all my earth and I bobbed along in my mind's gopherwood ark, everything stacked in her jeans reminding me of my past notions of the promised land and I had to turn both eyeballs, one at at time, with two hands each, to find something on the wall, some shadow to stare at until she passed us by, a sweet-scented ghost, and us with blood on our doorposts.

Answered Prayer
Realization spilled like
split yolk: we'd tended business,
all blonde thoughts of her banished.