Heritage Diner
At the diner three little indians sit horizontally
to each other at the bar seats.
Two from Shiprock who have known each other sit left and right.
The only one not from the rez
sits in the middle. They are facing the kitchen as they watch
the food being cooked on the stove.
One of the Shiprock girls recounts in familiarity her job at
the chapterhouse cooking for the elderly.
The girl not from the rez has never worked like that
before and instead recalls the time her
mother left the rez right out of high school and worked
fast food at KFC at 5 am each morning.
Among the chatter of a busy diner she hears Fleetwood
Mac and tells the two Shiprock girls of
a now defunct restaurant back in the eighties
called Flakey Jake’s which is just like
Fuddruckers only they got to survive. Anyways
around the afternoon when there was nobody
Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It
The Blues” would start to play and now when
that song comes on that’s all her mother thinks of
is working during those mundane hours of
the day in cheaper Tempe Arizona. Shiprock
Girl tells the not so rez girl that one day she would
like to open a café on her family’s land
with the orchards and all the pretty scenery too.
Not So Rez Girl wonders if it’s hard to start a
business on the rez because nothing seems to
last that long there anyways or maybe because
nobody seems to have money these days.
“They have money!” Shiprock Girl exclaims.
Not So Rez Girl watches the hashbrowns and
omelettes cook on the stove and thinks about
how when her mother was pregnant with her
older brother she met her mother in law
for the first time standing by the stove telling
her how young she was and that she should have
done a little bit more with her life.
So then Not So Rez Girl asks the Shiprock Girls how they
would like to be twenty-two and
pregnant with a man ten years older than them. They are not sure
what to say. Being at the
wayback diner reminds Not So Rez Girl of the signs
that read whites only
during the Jim Crow days that her grandmother lived through and
how one day she went in
one and came out with the wrong order for her colored cousin.
She tells her that she was
lucky that she could even go in there and order food for her
in the first place and to just eat
the food anyways. She was passing if you couldn’t see
by now. The three little indians
begin to eat their food that is finally ready now except Not
So Rez Girl is having trouble
finishing her food as fast as the Shiprock Girls are eating theirs.
Instead she just sits there
and decides to take the leftovers back with her. Perhaps she wasn’t
as hungry as she thought
she was and instead just needed to be reminded of something
she hadn’t thought of in a while.
Notes:
This poem has special formatting. View a PDF of the poem here.
Source: Poetry (March 2025)