Twelfth of May

After the muggers don’t kill me I go to the all night diner
and order eggs. I order chocolate chip pancakes. I order

sausage and bacon and beer because eating and drinking
are things alive-people do. There’s no ordinary time

in this city, it’s always some high holy day. Someone’s
always dancing wearing crimson velvet screaming in the . . .
. . . . . . .
[ subscribers: login [1] for full text ]

Able Muse Write Prize for Poetry, 2021 ▪ Winner

 
____________
    “The premise of ‘The Twelfth of May’ is simple: a speaker—who has just been mugged moments before—goes to an all-night diner to eat the ‘first supper / of my second life.’ What I so appreciate about this poem is its wryness, its gift for evoking landscape (New Orleans, a place of vivid celebration and loss), and the speaker’s sudden hunger in the early aftermath trauma (eggs! chocolate chip pancakes! sausage, bacon, and even beer!). In slender, elegant couplets, the poet explores that old theme of suffering, which as Auden once observed, ‘takes place  / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.’ Here, the trauma is not ‘a boy falling out of the sky’ and into a Flemish painting, but an ordinary street crime in an American city. The other diners are indifferent to what the speaker has just endured and the waitress ‘doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.’ It’s a scene perfectly rendered in witty brushstrokes, balancing so beautifully humor and grief.”
        —Jehanne Dubrow, Final Judge, 2021 Able Muse Write Prize (for poetry)
                on this winning poem, “Twelfth of May” by E. D. Watson.