Urns. Stools. Chrome. Greenwich Village after midnight. Museum visitors often appear lonesome after studying Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. If you’ve grown up in the diner business, though, the painting feels like home. A cleaner version, it’s true, but still welcoming.

after cocoa
the warmth
of the mug

It’s been five years since I last popped into the Art Institute to gawk at my favorite painting. Standing in front of it now, I sense a shift. The familiar triangle—the man hunched next to the woman at the counter, the waiter facing them—used to make me smile. It reminded me of the years I spent serving late-night coffee and pie to fellow insomniacs. The color scheme of the three figures is what I’ve failed to notice time and again. I can’t think why, because the pattern isn’t subtle; Hopper waves it in our faces. Red sitting next to Blue being served by White. A composition he imagined to be eternal in the 1940s. A composition unlikely to be revived in my lifetime.

framed flag
no way in
no way out

Publisher’s Note:

Nighthawks (oil on canvas, 1942) by American realist painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is on view at Art Institute of Chicago.

Maureen Kingston’s

poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Akitsu Quarterly; Contemporary Haibun Online; Failed Haiku: A Journal of English Senryu; Gyroscope Review; Ink Sweat & Tears; Maudlin House; Modern Poetry Quarterly Review; Prune Juice Journal of Senryu & Kyoka; Sledgehammer Lit; tsuri-dōrō (a small journal of haiku and senryū); Unbroken Journal; and Whiskey Island.