We met downtown and I almost didn’t
recognize him, seated at a table
with his back to the door. I felt a small
twinge of guilt, now, on seeing him so hunched
into his menu, closed off even from
the back, a mound of pilling gray-white plaid,
a tuft of brown unruly hair. I get
a whiskey, he orders a cider. Rings
of condensation find themselves confined
to vinyl coasters. What did we come here
to do? The menu changes every time
I visit, but I’m not sure I’ve been here
before. A mural stares at me from the
other room. “Listen,” he says urgently,
“We only have so many syllables—”
Zeke Shomler is a poet and prose writer in Fairbanks, Alaska.