Sinistra

It’s just a Thursday night in the flatlands of America.
He sits down and orders an Old Fashioned. Clam rolls,
all you can eat. He tells the waitress that his brother
owns a restaurant in West Liberty. The brother’s hiring.
He says that he wants to talk about it more but in another
place. Not this HoJo’s. He’ll wait for her until her end of shift.
He’ll take her in his semi to the bar across the interstate.
His cab is warm, and the engine never stops
running. He worries the cherry in his drink. She glances at his hands:
not the hands of a man in a clean business, black crescents of motor oil
beneath his nails. She meets him in the hallway outside
the restaurant where some turn left, some right.
Such a simple decision, which way to go. He tells her she needs to go
with him. The sun is still out. It’s summer. She vacates her body.
Her TV doppelganger tells him politely that she will drive
in her own car. She crosses the interstate, and waits,
but he never shows. A light dusting of leaves on the pavement:
a preternatural fall before true autumn: the hard, rutted ground
with its cropped stubble where he might have thrown her down,
but he’s long gone. His semi skims the highways, the susurrus
of tires on wet pavement. For years it haunts her, as she passes
every boarded-up façade, in every dying town, where there’s nowhere
to go, not even for a spot of coffee. It haunts her, the missing eye
of that derelict bar, two towns over, gutted out. Dead, alive,
it’s where she might have worked had she turned left instead of right.

Originally published in The Radiant (Tupelo Press, 2024).

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Lise Goett is the author of three poetry collections: Radiant (Tupelo Press, 2024); Leprosarium (Tupelo Press, 2018), which was the 2012 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in Poetry from the Poetry Society of America for best manuscript-in-progress; and Waiting For the Paraclete (Beacon Press, 2002), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize.

Goett’s other awards include The Paris Review Discovery Award, the PEN Southwest Book Award in Poetry, and the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation.

Goett teaches generative workshops and edits poetry manuscripts for publication out of her home in Taos, New Mexico.