He looked like an astronaut eating a rack of ribs
and she looked like a blackjack dealer. They sat
side-by-side in a red faux-leather booth in the diner.
The astronaut licked the barbecue sauce
from his fingers and the blackjack dealer folded
her napkin into smaller and smaller triangles. But, in fact,
she was the astronaut and he was the blackjack dealer
and after he finished his ribs,
he ordered a milkshake and two straws.
She recalled how the earth looked from the space station.
It looked like the Queen of Spades and the Ace of Diamonds.
And he recalled how the whale won enough blue chips
to buy a private jet and how each blue chip looked like a
little Earth.
When the milkshake came the astronaut said, “Wanna hear something?”
“Hit me,” he said
“Russell calls cyanide Nevada Gas”
“Hmm… The state of Nevada,” he said as he fingered one of her
folded napkins, “is shaped like a playing card with one corner folded
over.”
Mike Andrelczyk graduated from Penn State University in 2006 with a B.A. in English. He became interested in haiku and haibun while recovering from a tonsillectomy. His haiku has been featured in A New Resonance 8: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press) Contemporary Haibun Volume 14 (Red Moon Press), Haiku 2014 (Modern Haiku Press) and the forthcoming haiku anthology Haiku 2015 (Modern Haiku Press). He likes to write haiku about little things like potatoes and mint leaves. He currently works as an editor for an entertainment magazine, but the greatest job he ever had was as a bellman for the Sands Hotel. Once he carried The Shirelles’ bags. They’re good tippers.
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