Sarah Maclay
At the Thrift Shop Café
I don’t know how many times I’ve passed this
grove of yellow Hawaiian shirts
(as if people wore them once
and sold them back to the store—
they always look the same
and there are so many)
and taken this very corner into the back of the store
where you can actually eat,
but today, as I’m about to join my party,
I’m stopped by one item of clothing
and it’s a shirt I once bought my ex-husband,
which he tired of and gave to me
but which happened to fit my now ex-lover,
though I see he’s put it on consignment—
it hangs on the rack with four or five
other brown shirts
I sort of recognize
near our table,
where my ex-husband and my ex-lover sit,
commiserating,
really nearly weeping—
and not even about me,
but about their careers
and of course I’m wearing red and black
(but not my own:
the clothes belong to one of them—
I’m not sure which—or both)
and the waitress complains:
if we’re going to eat in her restaurant
at least we can show her the courtesy
of wearing our own clothes.
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Sarah Maclay is the author of The White Bride (U of Tampa Press, ’08) and Whore (Tampa Review Prize for Poetry). Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writers’ Chronicle, Poemeleon, Ninth Letter, The Laurel Review, lyric and numerous other spots including Poetry International, where she serves as book review editor. Her work has been selected for The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present (Scribner’s, 2008) and Verse Daily, and she received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XXXI. A visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University, she currently lives in Venice, California.