When dad’s grief
unbottled itself,
when he could not square
his guilt over the dad
he could not love,
when his beast of a past
coiled him, a rattler
ready to strike,
he would tell the story.
I still try to picture it,
my grandfather,
deep lines in his red face,
trademark overalls,
a Fedora tipped
over one eye,
ordering a whiskey
from a line of bottles
behind bored barkeeps,
the bar’s stale gloom,
barely visible through
the smoke of Camels
fingered by old drinkers
schlumped on stools,
regulars like him
who wished he’d
get on with it, shoot
the bitch and bastard,
or shut the fuck up.
No one this night noticed
how his pocket curved,
saw his old Army pistol,
a loaded Colt .45,
that minutes later
just outside their reach
would bare
its yellow heat
into the bar’s plate
glass, didn’t guess
how whiskey still
in hand, he’d smoke
the orange circles
of streetlights
and red neons
flashing nickel beer
and Budweiser,
or how bar mirrors
would reflect a man
slurried in a slough
of his own making
melt down on a
cracked sidewalk,
alone with the years
that tripped
him there,
his boy left behind,
frozen in time
no feeling in his blue feet.
Janet Reed is a 2017 and 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nassau Review, Chiron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Avalon Review, I-70 Review, and others. She is at work on her first collection and teaches writing and literature for Crowder College in Missouri.
