What happens when Adam and Eve leave Eden and clock in at a roadside diner?
In Beck Reynolds’s poem, the biblical first couple arrive not in paradise, but atop a giant slice of toast wheeled through a world of milkshakes, apple pie, crepe-paper ketchup, and small-town pageantry. Adam flirts with the waitresses. Eve trades her flowing robes for a pink velour tracksuit. And somewhere between the absurdity and the spectacle, a speaker nursing an ordinary heartbreak goes looking for answers from two people who were never children themselves.
The poem is funny and strange, but its surrealism makes room for something surprisingly tender. Reynolds strips myth of its grandeur to ask what remains when the people we turn into symbols are allowed to be tired, imperfect, and human.
We spoke with Reynolds about finding Adam and Eve through old-school diner lingo, constructing Americana from across the Atlantic, writing images that risk being strange, and why sometimes the closest thing to divine wisdom is an exhausted Eve sharing a cigarette in an alley.
Read the poem here:
Your poem opens with Adam and Eve riding through a diner on a parade float, immediately placing biblical figures in a distinctly American setting. Where did this image come from, and what made you want to write into it?
As I often do, I found the idea for this poem down an internet rabbit hole. I was reading an article about diner lingo and was very struck by the image of “Adam and Eve on a raft” as poached eggs on toast. I enjoyed the tension between the mythic ideal of Adam and Eve, and the very domestic, human setting of the diner that it’s being evoked in. Paradise becomes themed entertainment, and the speaker goes looking for mythical wisdom only to end up smoking in an alley with an exhausted actor.
The poem feels deeply rooted in familiar roadside Americana: diners, parade floats, milkshakes, and apple pie. What role does setting play in your work, and why did this landscape feel like the right home for this encounter?
Diners are liminal places. Strangers briefly interact, workers perform friendliness, lonely people linger. They are public but intimate, deeply artificial but somehow despite – or because of – all their artifice, places that can hold genuine human encounters like the one we see between Eve and the speaker towards the end of the poem.
You can probably spot from the reference to “HP Sauce” that I am in fact British, so my experience of American diners is constructed in itself. My dad used to take me on jobs with him, and we’d always stop off to eat at knock-off roadside diners. I fell in love with their colour and pageantry; how unreal they felt off a drizzly motorway. Diners sell us on a kind of manufactured nostalgia – milkshakes, pie and small-town charm. They are already places where myths are consumed in their performative Americana, so what better place to meet Eve after she’s just clocked off from a shift.
Images like “a sea of crepe paper ketchup and HP” and “Adam looks like an extra from Hercules” are incredibly vivid and specific. How do you approach image-making, and how do you know when an image is surprising without becoming distracting?
The short answer is I don’t really know where the line is – I just as often get the latter feedback when I share my early drafts with other poets or unsuspecting friends for feedback. I can only construct images the way my brain naturally draws connections between things, and that might be completely baffling to other people a lot of the time, but that’s half the fun of it. I love reading poems that take my brain to places it would never have otherwise gone on its own.
I was struck by how human Eve feels here. She’s bored, changes into a velour tracksuit, listens to heartbreak, and offers quiet consolation. What interested you about imagining Eve this way instead of as the mythic figure we’re accustomed to?
To an extent, everyone in the world of this poem is performing – from the waiters with their customer service personalities to the speaker, who’s trying to find something in these characters that probably isn’t there. Eve is wheeled in like a homecoming queen in a bizarre, kitschy restaurant parade, but that illusion quickly falls apart. She is reduced from an icon to a practical, slightly disillusioned actor, exhausted at the end of a shift. She doesn’t have any profound wisdom to offer, but she still listens and comforts in her own way. The fact that this kindness is clouded by transaction and all the artifice of the setting doesn’t make it fake. It makes it messy and infinitely more human.
For me, the emotional center of the poem isn’t Adam or Eve, but the speaker trying to make sense of heartbreak. What did you hope readers would carry with them after reaching that final line?
Yes absolutely. Up to a point the speaker is mostly observing and inviting the reader to laugh at the absurdity of it all with them, but then the satire drops away and we are left with a young person dealing with very ordinary rejection. It’s almost an embarrassingly small heartbreak, especially compared to the scale of what comes before, but to the speaker it’s everything.
As the speaker becomes more vulnerable, we also see the more human, imperfect side to Eve. The final line leaves things between them unresolved: the speaker doesn’t get perfect comfort or authenticity, nor does Eve’s reaction invalidate what came before. The conversation ends up being both genuine and transactional, grounded and affectionate. The speaker is going through a kind of disillusionment with growing up in the poem, and ends up faced with the very adult idea that contradictory things can be true all at once.
What is your favorite line in this poem, and why does it stand out to you?
I think my favourite couplet is
“I get up close to examine the purity / of those who never had a childhood”.
Beck Reynolds
Adam and Eve were obviously created as adults, so they literally never had childhoods, and the speaker – who is dealing with those characteristic growing pains we all face at the end of childhood – is fascinated by them as a symbol of an impossible innocence, free of first loves and teen angst. But this Adam isn’t a majestic first man, he’s off flirting with waitresses at the bar. And Eve isn’t the archetypal mother of humanity either, she just wants to be left alone with her apple pie in peace. The eternal adults in this poem, just like all of us everyday ones, don’t necessarily have all, or any of, the answers.
Did this poem arrive largely as you first wrote it, or did it undergo significant revision before reaching its final form?
I didn’t really know where this poem was going when I wrote it. I tend to just lean into an image or idea I find interesting and see where it takes me. The vast majority of the time I end up back in familiar territory, with the speaker becoming someone I can recognise. Once I feel that a poem has got where it intended to be, I try to keep my meddling with it to a minimum.
What made you decide to submit this piece to Mouthful of Salt? Was there something about the journal that felt like a good fit for this poem?
Mouthful of Salt feels like a space where outsiders are encouraged to run riot, and those kinds of journals immediately feel like a home for me and my words. I found you through Chill Subs and really connected with the witty, grounded urgency of some of your recent poems – especially Dylan Tulk’s “Dear Santa.” Who doesn’t want “repellent for the neighbour boy”?
Where can readers find more of your work?
You can check out the likes of Poetry Worth Hearing, Remington Review, The Poetry Lighthouse and Pink Ochre Literary Magazine to see and hear some of my recent poems, as well as Issue 03 of Mouthful of Salt which featured my poem “Flesh”. I’m also working on a debut pamphlet which looks at what it is to enter the world of work in these weird times. Hopefully more on that soon!
Beck Reynolds is a British writer interested in food, family and fantasy. She volunteers regularly at the Oxford Poetry Library and organizes free workshops for emerging poets. When not writing poetry, she is likely found furiously knitting or watching red kites fly over her house.
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