Sevana Bagdasarian: In a Restaurant

Watching you in the glass I wonder
what it is like to be so alone
and why you do not eat
but starve yourself, groveling
like a monk. You let food stand on the glass
so you stare against yourself
with great hunger,
needing to show me how you wipe saliva away
(resentfully and without hesitation)
until I see your reflection in the table, correctly,
as a man starving, not
the echo I enjoy.


Sevana Bagdasarian

This poem has appeared in ASPORA, Volume I, Number 1, Fall 1993.