Edward Falco
Note To America
A woman like you in sunlight leaned over the motel’s balcony railing
In fringed blue jean shorts and a bikini top and barefoot in the heat
Called to me as I stepped out of my beat up Ford Pinto in the parking lot.
She asked if I wanted a date and smiled with teeth so white and straight
They glittered in a flash of white sun in burning brutal unbearable heat.
She was pretty and young a woman like you with blond hair and big eyes.
This happened in Miami the summer I was twenty-five and on my own
Or twenty-five years later on a sunny day outside a trashed motel in Phoenix
Or just outside Las Vegas with a skinny girl who looked to be in her teens.
She was young. She asked if I wanted a date. In summer’s merciless heat.
You were off somewhere with one of your lovers and a bottle of good wine
Always a taste for the finer things high thread count sheets gourmet meals.
You were lost to me tired and sweating out there on the cracked blacktop lot
Jittery from the drive a lottery ticket in my pocket and a nearly empty wallet
Hungry sore a tooth rotting in the back of my mouth a body full of aches.
She looked like you. Same hair same eyes. Or maybe Dallas, I’m not sure—
As still she looks down from the balcony with a playful smile. “Honey,”
She says, “do you want a date?”—and leans over the railing on crossed arms.
Edward Falco is the author of the poetry collection Wolf Moon Blood Moon, forthcoming from LSU Press in 2017. His poems are forthcoming in The Southern Review and Blackbird. Falco has won a number of awards and prizes for his writing, including The Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review. He has also published several novels and short story collections.
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