Sara Ries Dziekonski’s Today’s Specials was published this month by Press 53. The poems are situated in an all-American diner in Buffalo, NY owned and operated by her family—where Sara is a waitress and her father is a cook who almost missed his daughter’s birth because “When the call came, my father stayed/at the Holiday Inn kitchen/to fry fish for a party of seventeen.” The father “Super Dave” is a fascinating character, man of hardscrabble tenderness. When he tells his daughter “You gotta pay attention” in the fast-paced short-order world of filling orders, she translates that advice to writing poetry. Today’s Specials serves up details galore—gumball machine, jukebox, the customers with bad hygiene (“The Urine Couple”), the sleezy customers, mourning customers, a customer who is a professor, Onion Eddie, Eggs Bennie Debbie, Old Fat George, Country Joe, Safety Pin Joe, Security Guard Richard…
Sara writes tenderly about the push and pull of the diner, big dreams of getting away and nostalgia for the family business in poems like this.
Family Diner’s Facelift
Antique cans swaddled in greasy garments of time,
boxed with the Norman Rockwells, penny candy jars
I’d Windex on slow afternoons when all the stainless steel
shined. Fresh paint where the gallery of past owners hung high
above the ice cream freezer: gone. Ghosts. The grill banished far
from workers’ stories that burn in memory of steel mills.
Soups, gravys, and corned beef hash—my father’s recipes
remain, his poems, written for 32 years with hard
spatula scrapes behind the counter. Today I request a refill
and stare at string lights where a payphone once rang dreams—
now still.
Congratulations, Sara!
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