Eric Gudas ◆ Best Western and Other Poems ◆ Read and Listen to "Orange Juice"

Home Order About the author Excerpts Readings Links Contact/Press

To listen to this poem press PLAY on the audio player or click here

Orange Juice
 
Four carafes of freshly-squeezed orange juice sit on the conference 
 room table.
The meeting is over; the governor, thronged by cops and security agents,
Has left the building—he’s riding through the sky in a helicopter.
Now the caterers are cleaning up, breaking down tables, hauling 
 empty coffee urns
To the waiting vans outside. When I ask a crinkled blue-uniformed woman, 
 broom in hand,
If it’s okay to use the pay phone, she scrunches her mouth
And raises her eyebrows to say, I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t speak 
 English.
Maybe she can’t tell my face from the governor’s face, or from the faces of 
 the other men
In charcoal suits, who leaned confidentially into the corners
Of the conference room—conferring, their decisions weighty as weather.

Behind glass the juice is molten yellow, the most real
Color in this huge building, the sky slate gray through venetian blinds.
Who will drink it? Not the woman sweeping out the hallway, her eyes intent
On the length of carpet ahead; not the catering guys, their thick arms
Strained with the weight of the loads they heave upstairs; not the one cop
Still loitering outside, her bleached-blonde hair slicked back, her belt 
 heavy with pistol, handcuffs, nightstick.

The juice must be warm by now—warm, but still vivid to the tongue, 
 tasting of fermented light. Pressed from the fruit’s inside,
It flares in the mouth’s darkness before entering the bloodstream. Poured 
 down the drain
It will mix with paint thinner, Coke, rainwater, bleach, urine from 
 the men pissing
Against buildings all up and down Mission Street, tears even, from the 
 face of a woman
I saw sobbing into a payphone on my way to work, her cheeks stippled 
 with mascara.

© 2010 Silverfish Review Press

Home Order About the author Excerpts Readings Links Contact/Press