a response to “Lunch Poems”
“How about lunch? I’m hungry,” one man says outside
City Lights, where Ferlinghetti is half-looking at a display of
Rimbaud and half at a girl who looks like she has never read anything
“Cooking,” says the other, as if they were in an apartment somewhere on
East 12th Street instead of standing in North Beach with a bus coughing up
everyone at once
One flicks ash, “Cooking?” and already they’re walking past Vesuvio where
someone is arguing about Ezra Pound again which is boring and also unavoidable
“You always say cooking when you mean postponing,” he adds, which isn’t fair
fairness has nothing to do with lunch a man with a newspaper folded to the war
walks straight through them or seems to and suddenly the day feels arranged into
a painting no one has paid for yet
“We could go to that place…” Ferlinghetti starts, meaning the one with the bad wine
and the good bread and the waitress who hates poets but then a car horn detonates
the sentence and O’Hara is looking at a storefront full of cheap watches thinking of
nothing which is rare and therefore important
“Jackson died like that,” he says suddenly, not specifying which Jackson because
he doesn’t have to “and Billie too,” though that isn’t how it happened but
it feels right here next to a man selling oranges three for a dollar
“Don’t start,” Ferlinghetti says, kindly, like someone closing a window “Start what?”
but they both know because lunch is exactly the time when everything unnecessary
arrives: death, love, that night in Paris
“We’re wasting it,” O’Hara says, meaning the hour or their lives it’s unclear
and now they’re on Columbus Avenue and it’s brighter than it should be
like a movie about noon
“Let’s just eat anywhere,” which is almost despair or freedom they stop
in front of a place that could be Italian or could be pretending inside,
a radio is playing something by Sinatra or someone who wants to be
“Perfect,” O’Hara says, irony his form of hunger they sit, the table slightly wet
the menus enormous and meaningless a woman at the counter is crying
very quietly into a cup of coffee no one mentions it
“You know,” Ferlinghetti begins, and this time nothing interrupts which makes it worse
“We could have stayed in…” and there it is the entire day collapsing into something that
didn’t happen O’Hara laughs too loudly like someone applauding a bad play
“But then what would we do with all this?” he gestures at the bread, the street,
the unbearable brightness of 1:03 at being alive exactly here instead of anywhere
else and they order anyway
Paul Potts is a poet from Oklahoma, U.S. He began writing poetry in September of 2024, after recommendation from a teacher. You can find his poetry in Frontier Poetry, Posit Journal, The Louisville Review, and Nova Literary-Arts Magazine. He was a finalist for the inaugural Rowayat Poetry Prize, winner of the The Howl’s 2026 Poetry Prize, and finalist for the Adelphi University Poetry Prize. Outside of writing, he enjoys playing jazz on both the drums and vibraphone.