by Mike Henry

I was reading a chart on the wall
detailing the nutritional contents
of a Whopper sandwich with cheese
at a Burger King somewhere in the
middle of New Mexico when you
came out of the bathroom and told
me that you had finally got your period.

Your mother was there and she said
congratulations and bought an order
of tater tots to celebrate and I didn't
even mind the unintentional yet
unfortunate pun because it had been
three months since you got your last period and even though there was a pretty
good explanation which was that the
wild yam pills given to you by your
herbologist had contained enough
estrogen to trick your body into thinking it was pregnant for the last twelve weeks,
I had still been a little nervous.

We hugged each other as if for the first time and I somehow wanted to pat you
on the butt and say "good job" like some sort of surreal baseball teammate.
There was an instrumental version of
a Beatles song playing in the lobby but it sounded more like a church hymn to me
and I sang along in my head;
holy, holy, holy, Burger King almighty

and felt pretty high and did a little
dance and thought about all the conversations
we wouldn't have to have just yet and
it was snowing a little when you
held my hand in the parking lot and
we got back in the car to drive to
the airport to fly back to Texas together and I knew that we would have free peanuts
and a coke on the plane and I felt like
the luckiest man alive.

[Mike Henry is Slammaster of the Austin Poetry Slam and currently serves as President of Poetry Slam, Inc., the national Poetry Slam organization. He also plays drums for the Asylum Street Spankers.]