Fortune Teller I don’t want to be here. Not now, when the fortune teller in the corner of the bar is packing up to leave. I want her there forever, in a knobby old chair against the milky panes of a window greased with the tack of countless cigarettes, though you haven’t been able to smoke indoors for years. Fresh breath of Christmas lights and traffic lights blinking outside, the noxious Cash For Gold business across the street, the smudged end of a rainbow. The intoxicating smell of impossibly stale beer. I want to look away, let her leave and walk out into the poetry of wherever fortune tellers go when their shift is done. But I was so close. One more drink. One more cigarette. I’d have sat in front of her like a dog waiting for the treat of my own fate. As she passed, I had to ask. Twenty-four years she’s been coming here. Every Wednesday. Same table. Same window. Leaded glass stacked like Tarot cards on end. The door leaked warm light then snapped its edge as darkness settled in again behind her. I wonder if she knows for herself how many years she has left?
Stumps in the Ashtray All these bricks are scarred from street fights, busted lips and gashed eyes, pot holes punching as hard as they can at anyone coming by; weeds punching at asphalt ceilings shattering black glass back into small beaches. Other side of the train tracks brown river sits still, dishonorable discharge railroad cops waiting to bust heads like sling shot rocks to curfew street lamps. *** We go to the woods to be surrounded, see flowers spring bright light, purpose rooted in homes they don’t have to build. Here, the houses are taller than the trees sometimes. There is wisdom in tall trees, stoic, shielding heat, blooming naivety at their feet – daylilies, dandelions, mint, clover – moving, proving their worth and spreading sickness; flowers nonetheless. *** Diesel trucks slap pints, chug at the gas station, burping cigarette smokestack clouds while two boys on girls bikes scoop butts into their cargo pockets out of a black sand ashtray. A third bolts out the door with an armful of candy bars and runs into a grove of untended weeds grown into crooked trees, a small forest in the palm of this clenched fist city.
The more Citrus-like Qualities of Louie
What I really want to do is tell Louie how beautiful he and his tractor look silhouetted against the creamy pink and orange of the sunrise in the morning. But if I did, he’d probably kick my ass, or at least spit tobacco juice in my face So, I keep working and pretend like I’m too manly for beauty. Louie’s like a big, ripe orange, the kind with that thick, tough skin that doesn’t peel easy. If you dropped him down a flight of stairs, he’d bounce a little, then just roll to some cozy corner of the room and put his feet up, like he’d never rolled down any stairs at all. I work in the hot sun with all the Louies that get out of bed at 6 a.m. to grab rakes and shovels, wipe sweat from leathered brows. While we talk about women we’d like to have or men we’d like to be, they wonder why my car is not a truck. I want to explain how in Of Mice and Men George seemed like Steinbeck to me. How, like any good politician, a writer should know his work from the ground up. That is why I mow grass. But, partly because I feel guilty for playing in the world they live, and partly because I’m afraid of what they’ll do if they catch me, I grin and make a joke. Louie shakes his head, chuckles and slaps me on the back – it stings a little. And I get a bit sadder, because we stand sweating in the morning sun, surrounded by a scene almost biblical, and we both pretend like we are looking at the tractor.
Softer
I feel air moving around me like ghosts in the room where the windows don’t seal. I have been sanding paint and plaster here for days, massaging bones into white powder, making clouds on the floor, apparitions of my own footprints like leaves fanning out, no stem to connect them, the way ivy creeps back up over the fence again and the lilac too, in full bloom, fists opening the smell of fresh sheets in a bed that isn’t your own. The first time a girl took her clothes off for me I was scared. Her thin things fell like petals disappearing into the carpet, the sheepish look on her face asking if the girl she was had turned into a woman the right way. How I was surprised her skin tasted only like skin, bland and salty like my own. I kissed her chest and learned how to use my hands differently for the first time. The way she whispered softer, softer, a stream trickling in the dark. My knuckles have small mountains of crusted blood dried on them, the pads of my palms cracked, scored with rough valleys, roadmaps to broken things. I finish my work and begin the routine of going to sleep. The sun is down but I can see well in the last cheap light filling up the sink bowl with water splashing paint chips off my face, scrubbing the coarse surface of stone and Lava soap over my welts to make them softer.
There is Always Time
It is getting late and we’re on the porch letting the last warm breath of summer coat us like a sweater listening to the cicadas create their own tide in the trees, echoing a locomotive whistling in the distance over the highway. We watch the cats play with a mouse on the sidewalk in the moon of the streetlight. You joke how much they’re like frat boys at a bar when too much beer fills the veins of young lives, like freightless trains – any track will do, and shouldn’t it? We talk about college, when we met. It is as sweet as the air where sweat forms between our fingers, intertwined, hooks among rail cars, claws clasp to a thin tale. This is the most important thing in the world, if you’re the right thing in the right place, and there is time.