There’s something a little off about the young woman
behind the counter at the diner on Charles Street where
Ed and I are just now sitting down at the end of a long day, an air
of preoccupation, you might say, a look on her face that says

she’s really not here even though she is, is ready to take our orders
even though she’s holding neither pad nor pencil but instead
rests her hands on her hips and looks at us for a moment but then
past us to the door we came in through, at night falling

in Baltimore, and when she looks out, we look out,
which is when I remember saying to Ed on our way over
There’re not many people out tonight and him saying I know,
it’s like they’re all someplace else—what’s going on, you think?

A half hour earlier, we’d said goodbye to the actors who’d finished
yet another ten-hour day of rehearsals for a play that begins
with a violent shipwreck and a character who asks what country
she’s in, and when someone tells her it is Illyria, she says

And what should I do in Illyria? The woman is still looking out
the door, and sure enough, there’s nobody out there,
just the emptiness of the night, and then a figure in the distance
that moves and stops and slowly gets close enough for me to see

that it’s the old woman who’s always out walking the dog
that’s older than she is and who once shook her fist
at me and said, How about a punch in the mouth, Joe College,
and then even they disappear, and we turn back to the counter

and the woman behind it, and Ed says Let me have
a chicken salad on rye toast, no pickle, and a milkshake,
and I say, I’ll make it easy on you—I’ll have the same,
and the woman turns and puts four slices of bread

in the toaster, and just then the little radio on the shelf
over the grill crackles and a voice says, We interrupt
this broadcast again to say that Dr. Martin Luther King
was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee,

and Ed puts his head in his hands, and I don’t know what
to say to the woman behind the counter, so I say nothing.
Somewhere on the other side of the door we came in through
is a woman who could be this one’s mother, someone

who has waited her whole life to vote but can’t, and with her
is a white friend who was bloodied for marching at her side,
a little boy who needed meals and help with his homework
but got a bullet instead, an officer shot dead in the line of duty.

The newscast is over, and a song begins on the radio;
it is “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding,
himself dead a year earlier. Our food arrives. It’s pitch black outside.
The streets are empty. Where are we, I wonder, what country.