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Skunk Tossing
Those late summer nights,
when we’d shot-gunned all the beer
and blown all the dope,
we’d go skunk-tossing at the dumpster
behind Dinah’s dented diner
out on the bypassed bypass.
Like a girl you like at a dance,
you ignore ‘em but you watch ‘em,
and just when they turn around,
you run right up and grab their tails,
swing ‘em up high in one big circle
over your head, then sail ‘em out,
to crash in the pucker brush.
There’s brave and then there’s stupid,
and then there’s bored like a hick kid
who’s barely made it through high school.
The night St. Onge misjudged,
it looked like a thousand girlfriends
at a thousand C.Y.O. dances
had slapped his eyes shut
and his cheeks to raw meat.
He was crying the same way, too.
No saving that face.
Pick your war, any war.
That’s the one he died in that fall.
The Winter Cat
, who never would,
far foraging when crickets flashed
like neurons in the mind of the field,
now, stung by first frost,
will, when called,
crying, come.
That summer-suddenly
arched deaconess of rodent doom,
fermata over noted vermin,
now deigns to dine
on meals unwrapped
from foil, not fur,
consents to sleep on clothes
folded in the cradle by the fire
where red mice dance
on blades of flame.
The Monkey
was furry like our coffee-stained couch,
wearing a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt,
like those we put on our son, safe with my
folks,
and a pamper with a hole cut out for its
windshield-wiper tail.
An enormous woman
was holding it in her fleshy arms,
on a porch on South Street, at twilight,
visible for only a few seconds
as I drove us home from one of my wife’s
ten-day involuntaries in “The Bin.”
“Please tell me you saw what I just saw,” she
asked.
“You mean the fat lady holding that kid?”
Those late summer nights,
when we’d shot-gunned all the beer
and blown all the dope,
we’d go skunk-tossing at the dumpster
behind Dinah’s dented diner
out on the bypassed bypass.
Like a girl you like at a dance,
you ignore ‘em but you watch ‘em,
and just when they turn around,
you run right up and grab their tails,
swing ‘em up high in one big circle
over your head, then sail ‘em out,
to crash in the pucker brush.
There’s brave and then there’s stupid,
and then there’s bored like a hick kid
who’s barely made it through high school.
The night St. Onge misjudged,
it looked like a thousand girlfriends
at a thousand C.Y.O. dances
had slapped his eyes shut
and his cheeks to raw meat.
He was crying the same way, too.
No saving that face.
Pick your war, any war.
That’s the one he died in that fall.
The Winter Cat
, who never would,
far foraging when crickets flashed
like neurons in the mind of the field,
now, stung by first frost,
will, when called,
crying, come.
That summer-suddenly
arched deaconess of rodent doom,
fermata over noted vermin,
now deigns to dine
on meals unwrapped
from foil, not fur,
consents to sleep on clothes
folded in the cradle by the fire
where red mice dance
on blades of flame.
The Monkey
was furry like our coffee-stained couch,
wearing a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt,
like those we put on our son, safe with my
folks,
and a pamper with a hole cut out for its
windshield-wiper tail.
An enormous woman
was holding it in her fleshy arms,
on a porch on South Street, at twilight,
visible for only a few seconds
as I drove us home from one of my wife’s
ten-day involuntaries in “The Bin.”
“Please tell me you saw what I just saw,” she
asked.
“You mean the fat lady holding that kid?”
Frederick (Rick) Lord is the
Assistant Dean of Liberal Arts
at Southern New Hampshire
University. After two years at
Wesleyan, he earned a B.S. in
Business Studies and an MBA at
New Hampshire College, then an
MFA in Poetry from New England
College. A collection of his
poems, What I Made Instead of
a Life, was published in
1996.Lord has recently
published poems in Dogwood,
Blueline,
Switched-on-Gutenberg,
caesura, kaleidowhirl, Bent
Pin Quarterly, Relief, The
Sylvan Echo, Glass, Juked,
Innisfree, Umbrella, MO, If,
and hotmetalpress, as well as
the anthology Family Pictures.
He lives in Bow, New Hampshire
with his wife Heather, a
painter
Assistant Dean of Liberal Arts
at Southern New Hampshire
University. After two years at
Wesleyan, he earned a B.S. in
Business Studies and an MBA at
New Hampshire College, then an
MFA in Poetry from New England
College. A collection of his
poems, What I Made Instead of
a Life, was published in
1996.Lord has recently
published poems in Dogwood,
Blueline,
Switched-on-Gutenberg,
caesura, kaleidowhirl, Bent
Pin Quarterly, Relief, The
Sylvan Echo, Glass, Juked,
Innisfree, Umbrella, MO, If,
and hotmetalpress, as well as
the anthology Family Pictures.
He lives in Bow, New Hampshire
with his wife Heather, a
painter
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