Waffle House Crush
I’ll have you smothered n covered n
diced n peppered n
capped n lathered n
lustred n smoothed n
spread
drizzled n dazzled n
blazed n baked n
blended n buttered n
shined n sprinkled n
seared
creamed n candied n
steamed n whipped n
stuffed n sugared n
spiced n simmered n
oiled,
reduced,
heaped,
dressed,
n can I get some coffee with that?
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2015. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2015 was Ken MacLeod.
Editor’s comment:
This is just the most fun with words this year. All lifted from the seductive phrases of a menu, perhaps a back-lit display above the head of the object of desire, each eye-catcher distracting from and returning attention to the other.
Author’s note:
Waffle House is an iconic roadside restaurant chain in the American South, and it uses a proprietary version of diner lingo to call in hash brown orders: ‘smothered’ means ‘with onion’, ‘covered’ is ‘with cheese’, and so on. Supposedly if you can reel off the whole list you can get a discount; I’m not sure, but the coffee mugs are pleasingly shaped. Anyway, I was there and there was a very gorgeous man there too and this food-slash-sex sound poem fell out as a result. At the time I was writing a lot about the complex cultural connections between Scotland and the American South, and the ‘n’ for ‘and’ is a little languisticator of that, serving to mark both Scots and the many languages of the South.
