The man at the counter thinks I’m younger than I am, puts his glasses on to check my ID.
He has a friend from Vermont who just passed away.
“Is that why you’re here?”
I feel like I’m looking down at myself on a map.
It’s been years since I’ve been to a funeral,
but it’s that same feeling:
You. Are. Here.
Lost in time but not in space.
He puts the bottle in a brown paper bag and slides it toward me.
“I thought I’d go back to California,”
he says. He speaks very slowly.
The tattoos on his arms have tanned and bled into Rorschach blots.
“But I came here in ‘94 and I’ve been here ever since.”
In my language, we say thanks by returning what we’ve borrowed.
The dead to the soil.
The lover to his wilderness.
The name to the face to the memory.
But that’s not why I’m here,
beneath the sick fluorescent lights,
my bottom lip chewed through.
I’m here because choosing is better than begging,
no matter the choice.
I’m here because there’s no such thing
as a meal without company.
In the parking lot, a young girl sleeps curled up in a shopping cart.
A south-bound train cuts through town on fixed rails,
one long and two short whistles.
Every sleepless night,
I count hundreds of reasons to leave,
tightening a painful knot
and shouldering the weight of the numbers.
All I need now
is one good reason
to stay.
Thanksgiving Day
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Enjoyed the free-flowing poem. Monsters in Vermont and Funerals are a good reason to stay for the choices and the naming of things. The man at the counter would know about the apocryphal ID’s since they had a funeral for the Rorschach test, the data being invalid. There was a guy who ran an old-fashioned “General Store,” that was the local Post Office, had hardware, farming tools, fabric, paint, and was a liquor store too. An unfortunate group of scientists who were attending a seminar nearby, got into a fight and smashed bottles of paint and liquor all over the store. Lawyers took pictures of the mess for a lawsuit. But they settled by creating the Rorschach test and giving the profits from the sale to the store owner who also owned an escort business. Hermann Rorschach Munster also collaborated with the store owner to invent Munster cheese. This was the beginning of the wine-and-cheese party tradition where chic words are coined, and where funeral directors study at the local College of Nomenclature. It’s on a map.
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That was kinda heavy….
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