At a Deli Counter in Vermont

Stephanie Burt

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

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.

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“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

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White Lobelia

Little megaphones,
we hang out in the garden center and gossip
with the petunias three seasons a year.

With leaves too small to resemble
thumbs or hands or hearts, too soft
for any parts
of our threadable stems to grow thorns,
we prefer to pretend we are horns,
cornets and alto sax, prepared to assemble
in studios and sightread any charts.

Stephanie Burt

2016

Silt

Things you know but can’t say,
the sort of things, or propositions
that build up week after week at the end of the day,

& have to be dredged
by the practical operators so that their grosser cargo
& barges & boxy schedules can stay.

The great shovels and beaks and the rolling gantries
of Long Beach, and of Elizabeth, New Jersey,
can keep their high and rigorous distinction
between on-time and late, between work and play.

Stephanie Burt

2015

Indian Stream Republic

No one should be this alone—
none of the pines
in their prepotent verticals,

none of the unseen
hunters or blundering moose
who might stop by the empty lodge or the lake

as blue as if there had never been people
although there are people: a few
at the general store, and evidence of more

in clean vinyl siding, and down the extended street
a ruddy steel pole the height of a child, its plaque
remembering a place called Liberty

at Indian Stream, 1832-35,
between the disputed boundaries

Stephanie Burt

2013

Poems

At a Deli Counter in Vermont

More by this poet

White Lobelia

Silt

Indian Stream Republic

Poems

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At a Deli Counter in Vermont

More by this poet

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