Flower Drum Song

That slick Summer night, we sat on the hood
of the cocktail shaker car her mother had bought her
as a high school graduation bribe.
We talked beneath the sodium light of the giant
bowling pin streetlamp behind Silk City Lanes,
next to where the Wild Samoans had their storefront office.
She said her mother had first come to America to perform
in the original Broadway production of Flower Drum Song.
It seemed unlikely, but so did the fact
that I was even sitting there with her at all,
with her tight skirt, her slender hips, her narrowed eyes.
There were fireflies, there were stars,
there were the lights of the nearby campus
with the dorm room she didn't want to return to,
where photos of her ex-boyfriend, my spitting image,
hung taped to the frame of her roommate's bunk bed.
We swigged our beer and wrestled on that parking lot island,
the silver hood of her rocket car,
before heading out for sushi.
Even before we suffered together through
that shitty movie about the topless showgirls,
even before she grinned
and pushed her skinny way upstairs,
I knew that this date would be our only one.
All the signs were there, spread before us in that sushi bar;
the way the soy sauce was drizzled across our lotus roll,
the way the fleshy folds of ginger curled in on themselves,
the way the blob of quail yolk shivered atop a plug of rice
that just sat there, choking in a collar of seaweed.
All the signs were there; if only I'd known
how to read them.