Wednesdays I waited on women golfers, endless
four tops just in from playing a hot eighteen.
They drank gallons of unsweetened iced tea,
demanded refills for free and complained
when the brew wasn’t cold or strong enough. I ran
on cans of Tab, kept a lit Newport perched in a crotch
of the black ashtray in the waitress station, lucky
to get three deep drags between cocktails and order
ups. The grill cook waved a knife at me, threatened
to cut off my tits when I didn’t speak up. The bartender
screamed at me for garnishing a dry Manhattan with
a maraschino cherry. I leaned on the roll warmer
and cried. No one paid attention. Every week, at least,
someone untied her black apron and said fuck it , walked
out in the middle of a shift never to be seen again.
I dried my eyes. In the nineteenth hole men
slipped bills in my pocket, eyed the V-neck
of my uniform whenever I set down
another round. An hour after my shift,
I was shit-faced in a bar that didn’t card me,
paying for cold Molsons with quarters left
by the lady golfers. I don’t remember walking home
on those nights, only the mornings when I woke to a wink
of coins on the bureau, hours before I had to punch
a clock again. I had nothing but time and I was rich.

-Sarah Freligh
A Brief Natural History of an American Girl (2012),
Accents Publishing

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008). Her work has appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Brevity, Barn Owl Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Woman, Third Coast, Tar River Poetry, and Painted Bride Quarterly and on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a poetry grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006, and an Artist’s Exchange grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1997. She is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.