Scene from a Bolivian Restaurant--By Marianne Szlyk--United States

Scene from a Bolivian Restaurant

I drizzle neon green sauce
onto fat, starchy kernels

as late morning’s light slinks in
like an impossibly thin teenager

past the bar
lined with liquor no one drinks.

Families eat lunch,
not breakfast, not brunch.

Nursing my can of diet soda,
I wonder

how the hot sauce and corn would taste
at home with our smaller, sweeter kernels.

I forget

we are only two blocks from the mall,
one block from the bus back home.

Marianne Szlyk is the editor of The Song Is... Recently, she published her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, with Flutter Press. Her first, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking Up at Trees of Heaven, was published by Kind of a Hurricane Press. Her poems have appeared in Long Exposure, Of/with, bird's thumb, Solar Nation, Quill and Parchment, Silver Birch Press' series, Jellyfish Whispers, Napalm and Novocaine, Poppy Road Review, and other online and print venues including Kind of a Hurricane Press' anthologies.