by Scot Siegel
The man hung from a blue-striped tie
my mother tugged on Sunday
The pressmen could wait, she'd say;
then he'd bolt for the door...
Hollering four or five;
home for dinner he told us...
Then we'd wait, and wait...
Eight p.m. Chicken rubbery
Flies on the rice. City lights
blinking through the ink flood...
I waited in the street lamp pall
I waited with the vagrants
Kept vigil by a fire. Waited under
the overpass at midnight. Fatherless
Waited for the Chevy sound
creeping down the alley. The handout:
The murmur of my mother greeting him
the smell of ink mixed with a strange perfume
His hands pulling the cool sheets
over my bony body --
Scot Siegel is an urban planner and poet from Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he serves on the Lake Oswego City Planning Commission and the Board of Trustees for the Friends of William Stafford. His first full-length poetry collection Some Weather is forthcoming from Plain View Press in 2009.
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