It’s pretty much Christmas. on the way home from work,
I buy enough for the whole neighborhood.
Everyone smells me arrive, comes outside
with beach chairs and flashy walking sticks.
We gather around the stop signs, prop up broken box fans
around us like soldiers, Vince Guaraldi tinkling through
the closest window. We spit pits for distance, the young boys
showing off and the old boys letting them. We swear
with reckless abandon, building a naughty momentum,
bitching about the godless, blue-collar July sun,
still baking the asphalt into hell-cake after it has already
gone home to the other side of the world for the night.
We knot tart stems with our lecherous tongues.
We gorge shamelessly on cherry flesh
’till we look like vampires, smiling in the dark.
(Published in Sleepyhead Assassins, Moon Tide Press)