Chinese Nighthawks
by Victoria Chan
after Edward Hopper
Foreground is customer service. Separating
who stands behind the counter from who sits in front.
Separating who knows loneliness fuels hunger
from who comes slinking in with nowhere else to go.
Can the most boundless person be
the one with his back hunched forward? It’s the light
radiating so closely above him.
Imagine the same incandescent light:
Same couple sat like battered salt and pepper shakers,
but instead of the folded bill in her hand,
a fortune cookie.
Same illuminated metal percolators circulating tea oversteeped.
Nobody asks if all the white people in a restaurant
are related to one another.
Behind the closed, squeaky door of the kitchen
is my mother, dicing chicken, wrapping wontons,
talking softly to her mother, saying yes over
and over. Rehearsing how to say sorry and no refunds
in the same sentence and waiting,
I am too short to be seen over the counter
to translate for the man behind the counter,
my incandescent father, hunched over,
not bowing to the customer just
hiding the large bills.