In Living Color

In Living Color

 

Armed with a butcher knife

my sister, six, attacked the new

television almost as soon

as the delivery man left.

A Zenith console model

“IN STUNNING OAK,

DESIGNED TO MATCH

ANY DÉCOR!”  And, by God,

it wiggled in very well

with our early-garage-sale motif.

Both hands gripped the oak handle

as she swung like Babe Ruth,

little chunks of that fine oak

exploded through the air,

lost forever in the shag carpet.

She did not know why.

We tried to fill in the gashes

with some brown crayons,

spread a long doily

over the top,

watched cartoons in color,

and hoped my mother

and stepfather

would not take the same knife to her.

Talking With Triggers

Talking With Triggers

Perched in a live oak

cloaked in moss

my uncle waited

for a deer, wild boar

or turkey,

while beneath him

two men idled

out of the brush

and argued.

Neither looked up.

A shotgun blast

from one blew

the other back.

A life soaked quickly

into the crispy

forest floor.

A sheriff brought

my uncle home,

ripped gaping holes

into the family

with verbal buckshot

and left with us

a loaded shell of doubt.

Six years later,

barely 21,

my uncle’s own life

was soaked up by sand

on a riverbed

in Southeast Asia.

Two of the men

who had been

in a Georgia forest

one fall afternoon

are now reduced

to piles of  lead

and bone. The shell

of doubt still rests

in the chamber.

Beaver Creek

The sounds were the same forty years ago,

but we shrugged off the babbling brook,

the gurgling crick, the rushing water;

clichés that could not choke

the fluid chords.

She still has a croaking throat

of limestone boulders, which spills

low tones over a gravelly tongue.

Through lips of sand and reeds

she begins every conversation the same,

“Do you remember when…”

I sweeten my mouth with a BB-sized

teaberry—it tingles my jaw like dill—

and wait for her question to disappear

before I answer, “Yes, I do.”

Socks

 

The white socks were turning tan

from being horribly abused every day

and washed with a bar of soap

every night for months. I laid them

across the heating vent in the winter

and over the shower curtain rod

the rest of the time. They rarely dried

completely, made my feet and shoes

smell like mildew, and finally got

too many holes in the heels and toes.

I threw them out, panicked,

put on my shoes and walked

to Bargain City where I opened

a pack of socks, put three pairs on,

painfully crammed my feet into my shoes

and walked out. I was not proud

of my first theft, but I had no money,

no socks and no magic beans to grow any.

They lasted the rest of the school year,

then I gave them

to my brother.

Whatever Happened to Sandy Posey?

Whatever Happened to Sandy Posey?

Becoming a man in ‘67 was easy.

I had a newly grown wreath of hair.

A dream had beckoned my manhood,

stolen my virginity before sunrise.

My father was lost to the war,

claimed by the mysteries of Asian women.

My uncle was lost to the war,

filled with lead during Operation Hump.

It was the rite for the oldest to bump up.

Moving to Phoenix had brought rebirth.

It was hot and exotic. The open-air markets

bathed me in the ripeness of luscious smells.

A bass player’s thumb plucked sounds

that thrummed inside my lower half,

while a sweet voice seeped into 

the airwaves and snatched my senses.

She was all alone in a great big town

and needed a nighttime lover

to get her through the day. No price

was too great to pay. There was a man

she had yet to know, waiting in a place

she had yet to go.

I stole the records and, when the songs

were not on the radio, played each 45 rpm,

over and over, until the abused grooves

could take no more.

I wanted to be her man, the banana in her mango,

the fresh cream on her morning peaches.

Sandy teased me all summer.

She was, after all, Born A Woman and A Single Girl.

Kathleen's Car

Kathleen’s Car

If one owned a car in Blue Jay

it was just as likely to be in the back yard

as in the driveway.

It was just as likely that

one would take parts off to sell

as one would buy parts to put on.

The front seat was just as likely

to be warmed by Skeeter, the coon hound,

as Aunt Franny’s fanny being hauled around.

Kathleen’s car was in purgatory.

Twelve years of bath-free minimal care,

harsh use and hard weather,

had planted the old Chevy

firmly at an undetermined point

on the eye-sore-to-rust-bucket continuum.

It did run, with a bang

that harmonized with the music

of hunting season,

and its smoke snakes

slithered invisibly through

mornings of impenetrable fog.

The choking venom poked noses

when the fog wafted.

Once a shiny new Baby Blue

it had grown a densely-knitted,

rust-colored shawl,

and paint once as smooth

as a baby’s butt had erupted

into ugly sandpaper.

She had taken us to town,

to the market, to school,

wherever our destination might be,

but such was our shame to be seen

that we dropped a coin, a book,

a paper and leaned over to pick it up,

so nobody would see.

In fact, Kathleen hauled most of the kids

to one place or another,

but you only ever saw her driving alone.

Helen's Place

Helen's Place

My father lived on and off with a woman

for several years. They would share

afternoon-into-evening-into-late-evening

drinks for months, then each would become unclear

about whether the other was good enough

or bad enough to keep.

During one of the “on again” stints,

her son sat in a chair at the kitchen table,

put a gun in his mouth,

had the will to follow through.

The knotty pine caught most of the death,

and it was my father who relieved

the wood of its burden. Scrubbing

the wall, running rags into the grooves

and channels of the panels then dipping

them into the bucket of warm

Pine-Sol solution. Each rinse and wring

tinting the milky fluid a deeper pink,

adding more bits and pieces

to slush on the bottom,

like gold flakes in a miner’s pan.

There was never an “off again”

after that. My father based

his handyman business in the house,

a man who couldn’t even glue his family together.

He died in one of its small bedrooms,

before I could tell him

that his work in the kitchen that day

was perhaps his best.