The sandwiches
are made of cardboard
and withered leather;
yet they’re delivered
with a smile
made of spun-gold sunlight.
In the leafy park,
a white van parks
before a hundred hungry souls,
neatly queued.
A nameless volunteer
hands out sandwiches,
two by two, limp squares of nothing much;
the smile she beams
into each blank face
casts a spell of sudden warmth
on this blustery gray-sky day.
The mind behind the smile
teems with calculus and Chaucer,
and with climbing tendrils of romance
with a suntanned boy
in his high-school football jacket.
The soul behind the smile
has escaped
a somber grid of suburban streets
where cookie-cutter houses
are scenes of bitter combat
over heavily-laden dinner tables.
Behind the smile
are memories
of Panama City Spring Break nights
laced with sweaty lust
and chilled tequila shots.
The eyes behind the smile
peer at the rugged reality of the park
where spent men on benches
cradle forty ounces of winter,
where tattered notes of ten and twenty
change hands among the penniless
for purchase and sale
of tiny packets of empty solace.
The hungry men
furtively admire
warm, firm curves behind the smile;
the volunteer
secretly dreams of her football jock.
When sandwiches are gone,
the white van departs, with the smile
and night descends
bringing the men
and the volunteer
hours of lonely solitude.
