waiter-customer confidentiality, litany to the animal parts & stop falling in love with white people by Aries M. Gacutan
waiter-customer confidentiality
look at me, harvesting grief
and confessions—
if i’m not gonna be tipped
then i might as well make art about it!!!!
might as well
tell you about that loss, that
fear, that one rude mother
with the kid she was scared of losing
might as well point out
the way people will be hurting and still
be rude to waitstaff
can i polish the old man
to a clarifying sheen?
can i show you how secondary
his rage at the qr code is
to his terror?
it is so hard to prove your identity
without an email address
and harder to still to prove to people
you are worth sticking around
or what about the women
i lied to about my tattoo
(death of a friend, i said
because he loved lavender)
she looked up that day
and could not bear the thought
that the sky just keeps on going
and i watched her eyes that night
as she put sparrows in the way
litany to the animal parts
and teens with nothing
better to do will circle you
in a parking lot
and children
will fling their bodies at
your precious space
and nothing will scare you
as much as
the next room over
and you will not bear
the sight of your
own reflection
and you will bake upon
the asphalt with
witnesses all around
and you will fall so tender
off the bone and you
will be eaten alive
stop falling in love with white people
i can’t taste anything
but whiteness—
sticky and hot in my mouth
shot right to the back of my throat
and i’m gagging on it!!
it’s left me swollen
and craving sugar
it’s not up to me but here i am
taking the whole damn project to term
meanwhile, my white friends shake my hand
my white friends shake like wire cages
my white friends
shake it off
shake it off
i watch them lean into mirrors
and fall in love with what they see
my whole life has been an exercise
in leaning and loving
the cant of my hips
tracks the swing of their gaze
and i am locked by lips and tongues
i am bound with no release
“waiter-customer confidentiality: I've been trying to pull together separate customer interactions from my last service job into one poem. I think they all deserve separate poems, but this was my first attempt at consolidation. litany to the animal parts: I wrote this after a breakup and then I got embarrassed about it and didn't want to look at it anymore!!! stop falling in love with white people: I've only ever truly fallen in love with white people, and I've wanted to write about how weird and bad that makes me feel for forever. This poem was one of my first attempts, which was frustrating in that I wanted to talk about everything and feel like I succeeded in very little.”
Aries M. Gacutan (they/them) is a poet, editor and digital writer who works on the traditional lands of the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation. They are interested in the role that space and place play in forming identity, and in particular how these roles manifest within developing and deteriorating digital spaces. In 2024, they were awarded the Emerging Poets Residency with Red Room Poetry. They currently edit for Voiceworks Online and NEOKOSMOS by Russell Cragg. They can be found @the.aries.zone on Instagram or @thearieszone on X/Twitter.