just to be close to my then boyfriend. We made out in the walk-in freezer, stopped at a taco stand in the back alley for vegetarian burritos on the walk home. When he left for Wisconsin, I was the only employee remaining. I closed alone each night, put up with two guys coming in at 9pm to do push ups and chant “ALL LIVES MATTER” and film my reaction and all I could do was turn to the next customer and say “I don’t get paid enough for this.” I trained two girls, received a raise that got me to $8 an hour, and pulled something in my shoulder when the new girl didn’t pull the chocolate from the freezer in time for our 9pm rush. Don made me come in anyway the next day. I’m sure he watched me on the surveillance camera cry while washing dishes, my mask slipping down below my lips, my pity party smeared in cake batter and waffle cone and sweet-smelling skin.
Susan Muth is a Best of Net and Pushcart-nominated queer writer from Virginia. A graduate of George Mason University's MFA program, she is the winner of the 2025 Cream City Review Summer Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Fork Apple Press, Ocean State Review, the Pinch, West Trade Review, and others. She is the executive editor of Off Season Mag and lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her fiance and two cats, Ducky and Cleo.
Recent Posts
- moments when i as a teenage girl felt most connected to famed tv mobster tony soprano
Mariya Kurbatova - Finding Art Therapy in Rehab & Realizing This Sort of Thing Isn’t All Bunk After All & How Decoupage, Crafting Scissors, & Fingerpaint Healed My Inner Child
Charlotte Chambers - the giver
Nols Nathankski - I Drive By a Bunch of Teenagers With My Window Down While Listening to an Audiobook by Sir David Attenborough and Right as I Pass Them He Loudly Says “Then The Couple Mates”
Mitchell Nobis - Demographics
Frances Klein - The Writers of Our Marriage
Amber Burke
