A Diner’s Guide to Avoiding Paradox
Everyone wants the keys to a time machine;
no one wants butterflies stumbling up,
historical right angles marching.
I couldn’t reverse engineer the art of eating soup
much less kill little Hitler without a spill,
a waterfall effect. But that toasted chicken sandwich
at the long gone bar and grill where Gay kissed Church
that tasted like making it back to myself
would make me spin the wheel, try a quaalude out of time,
get potato church back, before you ODed.
I want the 80s McNugget I peeled carefully,
age 4 in the backseat of a maroon Lincoln Town Car.
My pleasure dome smells like the pulled pork
from the deli slash convenience store slash
BBQ pit slash video rental and gun repair
where two highways to nowhere special met.
Sneak my Nanny’s banana pudding out of a potluck
before I was born; go bowling at the green milkshake
machine, knowing I’m safely without a license
learning algebra a second time across town.
Take my first campus diner’s cheez fries
to go; wash them down with a vanilla Coke
pulled in a 1996 Waffle House, when everyone
still smokes inside and it’s not fine, but
I haven’t seen bad yet. Call them my madeleines,
these remembrances of shepherd’s pies past;
if I can have what we used to order,
I won’t be tempted to find the ones not joining me.
With my bespoke time machine, I will find a
pink and purple and teal Taco Bell, trade
date checked bills and coins for ten
chicken soft tacos, the old way, when
I was eleven and my sister was sixteen, the meat
just meat, just cubes of barely chicken,
no lettuce, ninety-nine cents each,
small town teens cruising the parking lot,
me eating my always safe food
in the green T-top Camaro, humid summer
and the shine of a golden child
reflecting on her loyal moon-alibi.
Every good thing ends. One night, what had
been cubed and plain and pure was suddenly
shredded and runny and sauced with
something unsafe. She was off to college,
about to leave me in the house no one
knew was catching fire yet; I can’t
remember the last time, can’t place when
the recipe and the relationship went wrong.
What I wanted didn’t belong to me, so
I got no say when it changed
forever. Everyone who ever wrote
a sad song’s thesis knows the tune.
Even though she didn’t call me on my birthday,
which is fair enough considering how many years
I had hers in my calendar wrong, when
I’ve got those keys in hand, I’ll say,
you bored? and this time I’ll drive
two new people back to the future.
This time we can play my copy of License to Ill.
This time the formula will deliver – just right,
past tense chicken with just enough
fake cheese, perfect sister grown into empty
nester, little sister grown into gendersplat
poet. Same moon. Same stars.
Elizabeth R. McClellan is a white disabled gender/queer neurospicy demisexual lesbian poet writing on unceded Quapaw and Chikshaka Yaki land. Kan work has appeared in many venues since 2009? including Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Kaleidotrope, and most recently the light ’em up anthology available now from fifth wheel press. Kan work is forthcoming in Utopia Science Fiction. In kan other life, ka is an attorney and the creator of the Lou Swain Memorial Fund for Mid-South Immigration Advocates to assist immigrant and refugees experiencing domestic and sexual violence or family separation. Find ka on social media as @popelizbet and visit miamemphis.org to assist in the work.