Everyone Rides the Bus in a City of Losers by Jason Freure

Author:Jason Freure
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2018-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Restaurant AA

The waitress scoops up menus,

the orders of those not swayed by more exotic hot dog dressings.

My tongue fails me again and again—I can’t trust it.

I will lick the escalators at Place St-Henri

and let the blunt teeth sheer away betrayal.

Then truth will spout from my infected mouth,

yes, and I can tell the waitress I don’t like relish!

It’s too green, and the gravy is a little sweet.

If I could live either by the mountain or the Elpro building,

I would have to pick the closest to Restaurant AA.

Covet me, casse-croûtes, the way I covet you.

My faux-pas are breaking through the ice from below.

They are crawling out of the canal.

I must bolt the doors and rally the cook with his baseball bat

and arm the girls from next to Black Jack with shotguns.

The only illusions on Dream Street are VLT victories

and the appreciating value of real estate investments.

Many don’t know this: When the Chasse-galerie

veered from the New Year’s lights of Ville-Marie,

it crashed on the site of the Elpro.

The devil orders the cheeseburger combo every Sunday morning.

I only understand the waitress thirty seconds after she speaks.

I am a citizen of Trudeau’s country:

half-lingual and sort-of tolerant.

St-Henri greeted me with a Shawinigan Handshake.

I only hope I won’t end up rummaging through blue bins

after selling my degrees on Kijiji.

Even men who could be my boss eat the subs at Restaurant AA.

The waitress is everything I am not: competently indifferent.

I garble, like a man stumbling up and down active locomotive routes

and judging the different flavours of Blue Dry 7.2% and Blue Dry 10.1%.

The tables are full, the plates are empty.

The waitress stares me down

and with a stern smile takes my water away.

Away. Enweille. Whatever. I hear it all the time.

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