No One in This Dumb Bar Will Acknowledge How Famous We Are

Not the girls leaning against the pool table, not the men ignoring their buzzing phones. No one has even stopped by our booth to congratulate you for the time you tackled the sixteenth-ranked running back in the NCAA Division III College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin. Everyone is pretending they have not read the poem I published in the preeminent literary journal of the central eastern northwestern Great Plains. They’ve all turned their backs to us, their eyes on the televisions. Ron R. spins the wheel again, and I shout, I would like to solve the puzzle. The whole bar erupts. You order another shot. Ten minutes go by. Still no one asks for our autographs. You detail again how you once outran the Baltimore Ravens starting wide receiver before he was the Baltimore Ravens starting wide receiver, and I pretend I have no idea that this story ends with you splayed on the ground, your helmet cracked like a head gasket. This is how you love someone, I tell the waitress on my way to the bathroom, but she does not look up from the notes she’s taken about other people’s chili cheese fries. When I return, I find her offering you a free Irish car bomb, dropping it into the froth of your Guinness and laughing as you open up your throat like the mouth of a river. She slides into my seat at the table, takes your hand between her fingers. Finally, I say to no one, the door to the men’s room swinging open. Finally someone who wants the one thing we have. 

Sarah Carson’s poetry and other writing have appeared in The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and The Christian Century, among others. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (Persea Books, 2022). Born in Flint, Michigan, she now lives in East Lansing, where she is at work on a memoir about single motherhood, work, and the rules that govern the universe. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com. 

This essay first appeared in Rhino (2021).