Huddle House
/Marc Meierkort
We sat inside Huddle House diner – North
Avenue, Ashland (4:00 a.m.) sat two
& three to a booth – Renata, Johnny,
Amy, & a face from Sweet Alice’s
too sublime to admire. Shift & slide &
another song, the scenes at the counter
just a bit too on edge for our caffeine
addiction. Silence stirred remainders of
what we had left, wishing coffee was more
than beans & water. Thoughts of motion – gas
running out: the unassisted double
play: swarms of birds moving like bedsheet air:
Walt Whitman sitting two booths over, hair
fried, head on his plate, bacon in his beard.
Author’s Commentary: “Huddle House” was written years ago when I was in the midst of truly finding and developing a poetic voice and style. I have always been unusually close with my groups of friends, and have fascinated at the ways in which some poets (i.e., Frank O’Hara) seem to mythologize friends and acquaintances, bringing them along into their poetic world. I gravitated naturally toward that attitude and felt that the people I knew, the characters who inhabited my sphere of influence and experience, were worthy of being mythologized. “Huddle House” is a small attempt to capture that impression, creating a snapshot in language of one such small, yet mythic, moment.
Marc is a life-long Chicago resident and currently teaches English and Film Studies at Thornton Fractional North High School in Calumet City, IL, where he has taught for the past 19 years. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (B.S.) and National-Louis University (M.A.T.) He currently lives in the western suburbs of Chicago. He has recently had poems accepted for publication by Neologism Poetry Journal, The Main Street Rag, Pamplemousse, Poor Yorick, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Pennsylvania English, and Columbia College Literary Journal.
