We talked about it at the time clock
while we waited to punch in,
how it must have been the moon
looking half-starved and the radiator whiskey
brought us to her those Saturday nights,
and how the dog with the bowling ball
head barked from her front porch, back legs braced
to charge, front legs braced to turn
and retreat, and how a willow wept
its long springy tears across the tarpaper roof,
and how she came hard
out that door hung from one low
hinge and was on you, smelling
of possum, with stiff hair and a cunt
with whiskers stiff enough to grate cheese,
and how she pitched her head back, buttoned
those green eyes and shook out punk
birdcalls under her shower cap, and how afterwards
we took turns with her in the outhouse,
the door swung half-open, the lime-scented life
of the toilet seeping through
the half-moon cut in one-wall, and we nodded
each other daft, winked and said she's all that
and a bag of chips, of something like that,
and what we left out was the only
thing true: how she laid back when she finished
with us, yawned like some cat
curled in the last pocket
of a threadbare afternoon, the dull book
of a dead moth loose in its paws.
Nights at that place
he drank beer after beer.
His gut rolled
like a melon on the felt.
He said he could beat any of us
and mostly he was right. He played us
for quarters so he could feed
his thing for Hank and Willie
on the one juke box.
Paydays he wanted his winnings
in shots, so he could get drunk enough
to visit this redhead dancer
at the stage. He put nearly all
his pay between her breasts, then he kissed
the bruised air, because he knew,
like we did, that was all of her
he was going to have. Then he sat
by himself on a stool
and punched the air, a round against
the guy who stole
his old lady in Tuscaloossa, one against
the foreman we hated at the plant.
Against the no new love
and the no new luck
and every night nothing
he hadn't seen before.
Don Winter's poetry has appeared in a number of publications including Unlikely Stories and ART:Mag. This is his first appearance in Gnome