2 p.m. in Popeyes
All of my favorite meals are meals with my family.
Morrison’s with mom on Thursdays. Burger King
with my brother after defending my spelling bee crown.
Yes, you’re family now, but that doesn’t mean I love you
and that’s the end of it. Being family means you don’t get to leave
without me hating myself for wishing you were still here
and hating myself for not doing enough when you were still here.
Contra ain’t the same on 1 player,
and Popeyes in Florence doesn’t hit the same
because our knees aren’t bumping under a table too small
for our futures. Every Sunday lunch was a going away party
because we knew nothing lasts forever in a college town
except the dreams only a youthful body can stretch enough to hold.
We were Orpheus begging the gods for one more season
of Alabama vs. LSU plot lines. One more season
of job letters that made us light
up until we saw “Unfortunately,” at the start
of the second sentence. One more season to be Caesar
watching all the Alexanders who make us question
if we’ll ever do more than watch better men parade their victories
down our streets. One more season of mourning
every tomorrow the tornado took from this city.
One more season to offer food to each other and hope
fat and sauce and salt would buy us a better day. Is that close
to how we used to treat the gods? Did meat on the altar
ever keep a storm in the belly of the ocean? Did sweet smoke
ever make a demon toss his bag of plagues in the trash?
Did futility ever stop a dumb human from trying?
2 p.m. in Bojangles
It’s a late start as always.
I’d like to blame it on late nights at the bar,
but yesterday was a 2:30 kick,
and the truth of the matter is we don’t weekend the same way no more.
Instead we roll in with the church crowd
after listening to the praise mix down switch over
to regular Sunday programming–
because when Jesus say yes, nobody can say no.
Gone are the days of “a Muslim, a transwoman, a black guy,
and a white dude walk into a chicken joint,”
and instead we are just left with a buddy comedy
where the joke is on those still here.
No one is asking us what we thought of the play calling,
or what we owe to our students,
or even what we owe to ourselves,
but that doesn’t stop the breaking of biscuits
and the feeling of rapture that crashes
in a college town every summer.
Today, it’s just our Sunday best and honey mustard,
honey barbecue, any symbol of prosperity and abundance
in an imperfect kingdom of fluorescent light.
Jason McCall is the author of the essay collection Razed by TV Sets. His other books include What Shot Did You Ever Take (co-written with Brian Oliu); A Man Ain’t Nothin’; Two-Face God; Mother, Less Child (co-winner of the 2013 Paper Nautilus Vella Chapbook Prize); Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and co-winner of the 2013 Etchings Press Whirling Prize); I Can Explain; and Silver. He and P.J. Williams are the editors of It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami. He is a native of Montgomery, Alabama, and he currently teaches at the University of North Alabama.
Brian Oliu is the author of three chapbooks and five full-length collections of non-fiction, including the lyric-memoir i/o, and So You Know It’s Me, a collection of Craigslist Missed Connections. What Shot Did You Ever Take, a collaborative book of poetry on the Rocky film series with the poet Jason McCall, was released in 2021. His book of essays Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling was released in 2021 by The University of North Carolina Press.