Breakfast
︎︎︎ Joe Amato
︎ June 11, 2025
I think of you at breakfast,
at breakfast-for-dinner, at brunch,
and dream the pancakes of our summer lunch
cut short, the broken fast
of an asceticism that couldn’t last:
the fruit broke in fragments in our fingers.
Stains outlive the garment, outlast
noon’s savor, magnolia on a laurel breeze,
mulberries crushed into the bluegrass,
cooked in the pancakes you made fine art.
Last month I drove the twisting path
for a look at your old place one evening—
in the garden stood the mulberry still,
fruiting for a family who knows nothing
of our summers in their rooms. They drift
across the picture window on our past.
at breakfast-for-dinner, at brunch,
and dream the pancakes of our summer lunch
cut short, the broken fast
of an asceticism that couldn’t last:
the fruit broke in fragments in our fingers.
Stains outlive the garment, outlast
noon’s savor, magnolia on a laurel breeze,
mulberries crushed into the bluegrass,
cooked in the pancakes you made fine art.
Last month I drove the twisting path
for a look at your old place one evening—
in the garden stood the mulberry still,
fruiting for a family who knows nothing
of our summers in their rooms. They drift
across the picture window on our past.
Joe Amato is a writer and culture strategist based in San Francisco. He received an inaugural Passage Prize for poetry.
Also by Joe: Last Night