Indelible

Andrew Vogel

What will we not allow ourselves?
Consider all we carry with us in the body.

In The Valley Diner, Tuesday morning,
sturdy plates soar from the kitchen
on the girls’ arms, good chow glistening
with filmy grease. Ceramic clatter. Plastic
flower and felt-snow season. Outside,
rain washes caked salt down the lot.
Detroit steel.

Now look at water, how it sheds the colors
of time, how it proves—things we won’t do.

Taken with a fit of violent sneezing,
retired Petty Officer Paul Tomlinson
has completely spaced on what Kimberly,
the new waitress who insists on being
addressed by her full name, was telling
him across the counter about her
new tattoo.

Energies of the first law, porphyrin rings
congealing, ancient calligraphies knitting.

Tommy arrives back into himself,
damp blue eyes witnessing in her
young amber gaze a question he
wants to have heard, but when she
reaches, not quite almost touching
the long-faded ink on his forearm,
he flinches.

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Authors Note: I think about what holds us together and what holds us apart. “Indelible” gestures toward some of the tensions that we experience as our sense of self

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Andrew Vogel listens, walks the hills, and teaches in rural eastern Pennsylvania, original homelands of the Lenape peoples. His poems have appeared most recently in Poetry East, Crab Creek Review, The Briar Cliff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Cider Press Review.