In a traveler’s hurry we dash to the Continental Breakfast Cafe.
I am unsure to which continent the sign refers.
The roar of the interstate provides basso to the piped-in Musak.
Vast plastic pitchers pour
Cheerios and Frosted Flakes into cardboard bowls.
Dried oatmeal from one spigot meets hot water from another.
Blindingly yellow eggs neatly aligned in a chafing dish,
are of suspicious origin, unlikely chicken.
Bacon, curled and congealed warms in the dish next to the eggs suggesting
it was pre-cooked in a rural factory long after the death of the donor pig.
Doughy pastry sits on Windexed glass shelves and speaks to the vagaries of old age
as stacks of hermetically sealed butter and jam offer comfort
and induce guilt at criticizing the corporate largess offered,
and finally genuine bananas
grown somewhere exotic, shipped green across rolling seas,
proof that somewhere an industrial nutritionist
understood the importance
of providing one thing capable of spoiling
to keep things real.

© by Anita S. Pulier.
Used with the author’s permission.