Woodlawn

more irish s**t. genre cooking because f**k

I am sitting with my father
in a restaurant in Woodlawn, the
Irish part of the Bronx, eating
bread with raisins in it.
I do not remember what the bread is called.
But we are here, at this table
and there is a ketchup bottle turned
upside-down and a mustard bottle
right-side up. The bottle of ketchup
has no literary significance. Nor
does the mustard.
They are not the topsy-turvy
quality of pseudo-Irish family life;
they are not even the death
of the American dream.
A man comes out of the kitchen
and serves the adjacent table’s
meal. His mustache twinges with
sadness, but it too lacks a
metaphor. Disappointed,
I scan the room again and again until I come back
to the bread. The bread, my last hope
for homespun artistry in this restaurant, refuses to
budge in its inelegance. It is not a
symbol. At best, it represents itself: bread,
hastily embedded with raisins, sitting lonely in a basket
while a man a few tables away suddenly stands up
and points at a television screen and shouts:
“Man, did you see them Yanks? Did you see them
Goddamn Yanks?”