Almost​


It’s still the only day of the week
I wake up happy,
when she would bring home some
dinky toy from Groger’s,
and before we went to that Atlanta
drive-in to see Shane or The Thing,
we would go out to eat,
almost like a real family.
At The Varsity or Joe Cotton’s,
girls in paper hats brought
hot dogs on metal trays
and propped them on the windows,
with ground beef chili, not some
gooey sauce, tiger stripes grilled
on the buns, real French fries
and onion rings,
and Byerly’s orange, what
Yankees call soda,
but we called coke,
because it almost was,
only better.




Ars Poetica
 

something urgent
down deep, like those kids
who fall into abandoned wells and
firemen and cops and fat neighbors surge
round to lower ropes and buckets to bring them
up, all muddy and slippery as if they’ve just come
from the birth canal and everybody cheers, and it’s late
at night and all is silent, but you can hear them, all those
cheers as you wash and bathe the newborn, and put her to
bed with that special blanket she’ll wear to a ravel she’ll call
Little End.