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

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.