The bellow of her Buick 8
scattered egrets and redfish upon ignition
like soap dropped in a greasy skillet.
An ingenious amalgam of junk-yard scraps,
spare parts from the Gulfway machine shop–
she wasn’t pretty but, damn, could she sing!
Her wooden hull’s raucous vibrato
shattered the Sabine’s brackish mirror,
earning stares from spiteful fisherman ready to
blame the day’s small catch on Colleen.
Heads bowed in prayer,
the room sits motionless
save the swelling of tears
and a single suspended balloon.
Discordant in its lightness,
tied to the handle of a casket
whose small dimensions
defy its sorrowful heft,
it rotates under dim lighting.
A macabre marquee of tinny silver
and pastel blue,
its silent cacophony
heralding “Baby Boy!”
in vibrant letters
as it pulls taut its silken tether.
R.I.P. Baby Asher
From a book whose binding creaks in protest
of being opened for the first time in ages
falls a folded profession of love. Compressed
between brittle and neglected pages,
scrawling hand perfectly preserved on
paper long ago torn from a pocket-sized
notebook, remains the feelings of one
meant solely for another. Amended and revised,
the labored lines meander around unsuited
words like an aged river yearning for the sea.
Either forgotten by its author once concluded
or forsaken by the adored, the passionately
penned love letter, concealed in its tome, sadly survived
decades longer than the undying love it vehemently described.
From the beginning, everyone told me, “Oh, that is a good job” or “Post Office jobs are hard to come by, you’d better hang on to that one!” Mind you, this advice never came from an actual postal employee, but from people like my Aunt Carolyn. Her only job was in the mid-eighties, cleaning dog hair from the drains of over-sized sinks at BarkenWoof Pet Salon before she got married.”You better not fuck this one up,” she warned me during Thanksgiving dinner of 2003, trying her best to sound omniscient with corn in her teeth. “Government benefits? Damn right.” Her lips glistened with grease as her mouth issued words of admonishment.
The job itself wasn’t terrible, mind you. The mail carriers never smelled that great and paper cuts were the biggest on-the-job hazard; but the customers, the needy fucking customers, became my biggest issue. After just a few months of slinging stamps and mindlessly asking, “Anything, liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous,” (as if someone would scoff in disbelief and announce that they’ll be taking their nitroglycerin-and-kitten-shipping business elsewhere) it became apparent some of these people thought of me as their friend. My courtesy and professionalism were readily being mistaken for genuine interest and affability by a segment of the population who collected fucking stamps and still wrote letters. Continue reading
“What’s your number?” he asked as I used the straw to rearrange the ice in my glass. Never feeling completely comfortable in gay bars, I spent a fair amount of time seemingly contemplating the liquid/solid ratio of my Long Island Iced Teas.
“Uh…like, in inches?” I responded. Intention and sincerity have a hard time keeping their pants on in places like this. You can never tell with some of these guys if their first question is going to be, “What is your philosophy on life?” or “Are you a bottom or a top?” He wasn’t exactly exuding intelligence, so I assumed the latter question to be poised shortly.
He laughed a bit too hard and placed his hand on my arm, ceasing my stirring. “You are too funny!” he squealed. “I mean like, your number, like notches in your bedpost. How many guys have you been with?”
Up to that point, honestly, I had never considered keeping count; I never quite saw the point of it. The only tally that ever mattered to me was when the number changed from zero to one. Continue reading
Skyler D. Williams 