As November Approaches

people eat in Dairy Queen alone
on Friday night. A woman whose
confusion of stringy gray hair
curtains her eager eyes with greasy age
dunks a triangle of toast
in a cup of thick chicken gravy
and launches uproarious laughter
into a turquoise paperback
entitled The Viscount Who Loved Me
by Julia Somebody. My two
youngest kids say not to stare.
Our older girls have married
and moved to the meager dreams
and sundowns smothering other towns.
Our middle girl evades
the worn chore of morning
and wanders home, backpacking
midnight moons, outfoxing
our mundane offering of hours.
Slinging vibrant vignettes,
she appears like a painted bookmark
we forgot we left in place.
True, the summer I returned
to another town of autumn voids
and windblown views, I worked
the Dairy Queen drive-thru,
serving the food people came
to eat alone. Reviewing now—
three songs autolooped all day
through the house p. a. “Shiny Happy
People,” “Wild, Wild West,”
and “Wind of Change.”
Included in our crew: Michelle,
who made the maroon
in the snug top of her butterscotched
uniform zing. Jennifer Q.,
quoting Stephen King passages
during breaks. And Steph,
peppy and blond, with the cropped
bob cut, who across the canyon
cruised Blue Lakes Boulevard
in my mom’s convertible Rabbit,
unleashing the news of her baby son,
the father, her ex-boyfriend,
a punk bassist in Cupertino,
the gusts buffeting our young fears,
her dewy eyes revolving to me
as if choosing from a new menu
of illuminations her next big mistake.
Sooner than we can begin
from where we left off,
alone and laughing, fifty years
rolls over us like an afterword,
a townful of dull birch leaves
sweeping brittle surges over the roads
to be ground to powder in gutters,
the charred skies of October aflame
with something urgent that can’t be named
or narrated, only exclaimed.

Matthew Babcock is an Idahoan, writer, and failed breakdancer. He is the author of Points of Reference (Folded Word), Strange Terrain (Mad Hat), Heterodoxologies (Educe Press), Four Tales of Troubled Love (Harvard Square Editions), and Future Perfect (forthcoming, Engine Books, 2020). Additionally, Matthew is the proud recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, the Juxtaprose Poetry Award, and the Lucidity Magazine Poetry Award.