At a Deli Counter in Vermont
Your ride home complains the grocery store is freezing
they’d rather wait outside the burly guy
with the walrus stache asks whether you want your Italian
with the works You’re not sure what that means
So you ask and he tells you laboriously surprised
and also do you want tomato thanks
you lean on the counter and focus on condensation
the chill on your palm and forearm and under the glass
the meats in trays and butcher paper beds
some sausages sad stacked-up tongue
a leathery souse or loaf so out of it
that when he wants to know if that’s your order
and calls out loud Is that your order ma’am
you startle and then apologize for taking up his time
but he called you ma’am so you don’t mind
Copyright © 2019 by Stephanie Burt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“It happened exactly as the poem says. I was delighted by what for most people would have been an awkward consumer interaction, because a stranger had seen me in a literally unflattering light, and heard my voice, and still saw me as a woman. For binary trans people like me, that's huge. Our sense of self-worth and well-being can depend on whether the people around us reinforce, or deny, our inner sense of who we are. As for the lines, they're vaguely Anglo-Saxon, with midline breaks. I think I learned to do that sort of thing (if I did learn it) from Forrest Gander, though there are other examples, among them Carter Revard!”
—Stephanie Burt
Stephanie Burt
A poet, literary critic, and English professor at Harvard University, Stephanie Burt is the author of two poetry collections and a number of critical works.