~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Steven Reilly

Hopper’s Automat

First exhibited Valentine’s Day 1927

She could be your grandmother—

more likely your great-grandmother—

the woman with a nickel cup of coffee

in the late-nite light of a 1927 automat.

The Jazz Singer and talkies in movie houses,

but the Twenties roar down to a whimper—

to be choked into silence by October ’29.

Alone. A woman contemplating her life,

one critic said, seeing the empty

wood chair in the foreground magnifying

her isolation. Her downturned

eyes darkened like the backdrop of window

behind her reflecting a constellation

of automat lighting. No North Star for her.

We might imagine her as not ready yet to brave

the chill of East 42nd Street and the walk to

her furnished room, too small, no home.

(What else could a young woman alone afford?)

Leave her to sip her coffee, imagining if she wants,

Rudolph Valentino driving his Pierce-Arrow,

with her to God-knows-where, somewhere warm.

Stephen Reilly’s poems appeared in Charon, Wraparound South, Albatross, Main Street Rag, Broad River Review, Cape Rock, Poetry South, and other publications. One of his poems appears in the anthology Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination (edited by Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice O’Sullivan, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Fla. 1995). He retired in 2023 after working more than 30 years as a staff writer for the Englewood Sun, a daily Florida newspaper with circulation in south Sarasota County, Charlotte, and DeSoto counties.