Crab Fat Magazine #2

Des Moines By: Thomas Michael McDade

In my ramshackle Ford, the '67 trip from Providence

to Boulder was so scary that much was suppressed or suffered

the youthful affliction that all thoughts and deeds

remain pulverized in mind, duration accessible

like the first piece of ass. The grub I ate along the pikes

would have been the least of my spirit's recording worries

but it strikes me I might have favored ham or egg salad.

No wedges of apple pie, simple or a la mode

and there are no flashbacks to hot diner coffee

following the tow out of the snowdrift

or the first chorus of knocking rods.

That dessert had no significance. I had yet to read

Kerouac. "Nutritious and it was delicious of course,"

he noted, On the Road early, later he noted that

 "...deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer."

Forty-six-years down the blacktop and still driving

a car with in questionable health, pie was paramount,

as I rolled along a portion of my daring youthful trek.

I didn't make Des Moines as I did in '67.

"The prettiest girls in the world" inhabit

that burg according to Jack: 'Bevies' of them

"and apple pie and ice cream-it was getting better."

I attempted Beat nutrition at a PA truck stop

but the script the waitress, older than me

spewed included no apple, not even cherry,

Jack's Nebraska choice – imagine!

In Ohio, I won at a shiny diner,

but the serving was nothing to write

your first piece of ass about.

I imagined it delicately propped on ice

in a Styrofoam cooler and crossing

the Iowa border the lid popping off

due to the fabled dessert aping bread

and fishes and my plain and worn

waitress young, stunning,

delicious and famous

for digging older men.