Lost Appetites

Published by RP Verlaine at December 6, 2023

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“You still hungry?”
come words
from high glossed,
almost polished
lips to make my
date appear younger,
a beauty however.

“No, I just don’t like –”
I tell her –
“food to be wasted.
There are are too many hungry people
who’d eat it off the floor
even with people they
know watching.”

She fixes me with
hard crystal eyes, blue
without being sad. I notice
a hardness I’d missed,
the beauty now gone.
“If they’re hungry, it’s
because they’re lazy,
stupid, or both.”
She’d told me
she was conservative,
but didn’t add mindless.

“Sometimes it’s having too many
kids and buying them clothes,
or things for school or doctors,
or getting a car fixed you need
for work or…”

“There are government programs.
Don’t freakin’ mansplain to me!”

The waiter comes with her
barely eaten sirloin and
barely touched salad in
a white bag,

my Porterhouse, onions, and
mushrooms with wild rice long gone. I hold
my beers to two and the damage
is just over a hundred dollars.

A week before I’d sent less
than a quarter of that to the Feed My
Starving Children charity, and now
feel guilty as I put away
my credit card.

Dead silence at our table.
Maybe I wasn’t
going to sleep with her
after all.

“You aren’t going to eat
that are you?” she asks with
an almost delicate shudder.

“First thing tomorrow!” I say,
smiling brightly. She stands up,
thanks me for dinner, and
is gone.

I have a beer and leave. Toss
the white bag to the homeless man outside
the restaurant. Invisible to her, I guess.
His besotted eyes
shine with inebriated glitter when
I tell him it is steak.
Then I walk home
knowing that only
his smile is real.

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RP Verlaine

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RP Verlaine lives in New York City. He has a MFA in creative writing from City College. He taught in New York Public schools for many years. His first volume of poetry, “Damaged by Dames & Drinking” was published in 2017 and another, “Femme Fatales Movie Starlets & Rockers” in 2018. A set of three e-books titled “Lies From The Autobiography” vol 1-3 were published from 2018 to 2020. His latest book, “Imagined Indecencies”, was published in February 2022. He was nominated for a pushcart prize in poetry in 2021 and 2022.