Amber

Sitting at the corner table just off the main stage,
I watched as a girl danced like a mosquito larvae
In a bucket of water:
Twitching and tumbling to the rapid beat
Of bass drums and her body bathed in
Dollar bills and red lights.

Every woman walking by was the same--
A hint of lust and sadness drowned by
Perfume and cheap tequila,
Roared out of their bodies as they paraded
In platform shoes and panties—
And I thought of them like one of those
Mosquitoes trapped in amber.

Witnessing Domestic Violence on a Delightful Friday Afternoon

The wind shook the frail limbs
Of the young white oak.
The leaves spinning in gyrations,
Flashing the almost translucent green
Of their veined bottom,
Looked like photographers cameras
Pulsing light at the swing of a bat.

My neighbor’s truck pulled in the lot
Popping small pearl pebbles beneath
His gratuitously large tires.
He never took his sunglasses off
As he opened the door,
Drug his wife into the yard
And slapped the shit out of her,
For all the neighbors and leaves to see.

A Sunday Afternoon in Loachapoka

The crisp click of boot against porch
Followed by a steady slide of grinding grit and dust
Blown from the road to settle underneath
His foot
Signaled another downswing in the chair

The talk turned to grass clippings and
Moving a mound of dirt from one side of the yard
To the other
While the wind blew Old Glory against the
First National

More than five minutes passed
And we sat stone faced as
The trees cut the sunlight into
Parallelograms on the grass and the air felt light
As September began to show her age.