In the Event John Ashbery Walks into this All-You-Can-Eat Buffet
The macaroni here is crusted by lamplight,
& that sounds wonderful, an all-expenses-
paid getaway for your mouth, the experience
illuminated by all these Grandma Moses
prints on the wall—perhaps they should invest
in track lighting, to give the landscapes
the ambience they deserve, but it's only
a 24-hour-all-you-can-eat buffet,
& it's not like John Ashbery is going
to stumble into this place & give it
the write-up of its history in ARTNews.
I'm probably risking my reputation here—
someone told me you can only make fun
of dead people on the page, so long as they're
not newly dead, because that's tacky,
so maybe instead of Ashbery, Tolstoy walks
into the diner, queues in the buffet line
& offers us the verisimilitude of wilted lettuce,
too-sweet cherry tomatoes & regrettable chicken
fried steak: the lumps in its gravy, the cost
on the soul for eating such a meal
in such a place. As he leaves for the parking lot,
he'll mistake the penumbra of the building
for the diabetic failing of his eyeballs.
Jared Walls is an MFA candidate at Texas State University, where he serves as poetry editor for Front Porch Journal. He lives with his wife Caroline in a Reagan-era duplex in Austin, where he writes about cats, hipsters and Communists on his blog, someliesistole.wordpress.com.
