Culture & Media
Midnight Special (The Donut Inn)

It’s late, so the late
Karen Carpenter comes off
the radio at 1 a.m. The diners
complain; she’s passé, she’s so
post-mortem. You see,
it’s Night of the Living.
Outside the sirens rise up
and home in. Now I’m upstairs
asleep, lost to this din,
but downstairs the Usuals
stake out a square
of linoleum, sit down and
fit in.
Like the jailed I bet
they get the same damn thing.
Some special—Styrofoam.
They sip the rim. I bet
at this hour the donuts
lie face up, half
human. The walls are glass
there, so those guys can see
the fix they’re in: a block
of illegally parked cars,
laundries, liquor stores with
something for everyone who still
can’t win.
At a time like this who
drinks caffeine with cream
or black? They must have given
up. They must know
they won’t sleep again. I bet
when Macbeth set out
to kill it he thought, well,
here’s someplace to begin.
I may be asleep, but my insomniac
heart rides out to join up
with them, those late,
late bloomers at
The Donut Inn.
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Source: In Danger (1999), published by The Roundhouse Press.
Suzanne Lummis is an executive board member of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, the California correspondent for New Mexico’s Malpais Review, and a longtime award-winning teacher for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Recent poems have appeared in The Rattling Wall, Hotel Amerika, and are forthcoming in Solo Novo and an important new literary magazine which will debut this fall, Miramar.
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Five Poems the Next Mayor Should Read
These poems by some of L.A.’s finest poets are intended to help Mayor-elect Eric Garcetti look closely at our city and listen with care to its diverse voices, from janitors to sidewalk fruit sellers to donut shop insomniacs. They are also an antidote to the platitudes of the campaign trail, and a reminder that the best political speech—and acts—can tap into people’s deepest emotions and aspirations.

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