The Deli Clerk
We go for a sub.
I watch the deli clerk
struggle to pull on
plastic gloves.
I want to say: don't
bother, but he is young
doesn't know
there was a time
we all used to touch
each other.
PETER NEWTON is a stained glass artist in Winchendon, Massachusetts. His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Berkshire Review and Prairie Schooner among others. For the past twenty summers he has returned to the Green Mountains of Vermont where he is a front desk clerk at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.