Over there.  Whiskey sour.
Even her drink is wrong.
That's for salesmen from Peoria, not
punked-out madonnas in leopardskin coats.  

Sweating under her makeup.  It's July
and she's not from Brighton Beach,
so that's not her excuse.  Not from here,
not from anywhere.   Black fingernails
—chipped.  Bitten.  Blank stare.  
What you call rode hard and put up wet.

Sucking on ice? Not ladylike, doesn't care.
Done in and done to.  
That coat.  She was something before this guy.
You can tell. Some leopard had to die
to make her like him.  

She orders another. Good for her. 
Best wait till the hell she came in with
turns into something else.

A military brat born on a missile base in Florida, Pamela Allen Brown moved every year until she was 12, which meant she could make her own reality during show-and-tell. A former journalist, she now teaches literature and gender studies at the University of Connecticut. Her poems have appeared in Epiphany, Public, The Sonnets Remixed, and Visual Verse, and her chapbooks include The Coffee Poem, Cara, East Main, and Remember This?