Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Minnie Bruce Pratt
The author of several collections of poetry, Minnie Bruce Pratt's book The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems received the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry...
More >
FURTHER READING
Poems about Breakfast
During Wind and Rain
by Thomas Hardy, read by James Wright
Egg
by Aleš Šteger
Morning in the Burned House
by Margaret Atwood
On the Terrace
by Landis Everson
Poems about Eating
A Wicker Basket
by Robert Creeley
Apples
by Grace Schulman
Dead Horse
by Thomas Lux
Dream In Which I Meet Myself
by Lynn Emanuel
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Eating The Bones
by Ellen Bass
Egg
by Aleš Šteger
The Book of the Dead Man (Food)
by Marvin Bell
To a Poor Old Woman
by William Carlos Williams
Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries
by Stanley Plumly
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
Breakfast  
by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Rush hour, and the short order cook lobs breakfast
sandwiches, silverfoil softballs, up and down the line. 
We stand until someone says, Yes? The next person behind
breathes hungrily. The cashier's hands never stop. He shouts:
Where's my double double? We help. We eliminate all verbs.
The superfluous want, need, give they already know. Nothing's left
but stay or go, and a few things like bread. No one can stay long,
not even the stolid man in blue-hooded sweats, head down, eating,
his work boots powdered with cement dust like snow that never melts.



Share Digg StumbleUpon Facebook E-mail to Friend



From The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems by Minnie Bruce Pratt. Copyright © 2003 by Minnie Bruce Pratt. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.
Smaller TypeSmaller Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2012 by Academy of American Poets.