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  • Waffle House Crush
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Waffle House Crush

Harry Josephine Giles

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?


Harry Josephine Giles

from Tonguit (Glasgow: Freight Poetry, 2015)

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

Best Scottish Poems 2015 cafés food language list poems

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.

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Best Scottish Poems 2015

edited by Ken MacLeod
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Harry Josephine Gilesb.1986

Harry Giles is from Orkney and now lives in Edinburgh, where they co-founded the spoken word events series Inky Fingers and co-directs the live art platform Anatomy.
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