Nostalgia
Picasso Cordwood, #1
Fight of the Century
Tonight I am nostalgic for the Cold War
and women with pubic hair,
David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, Bobby Sherman,
TV’s with antennas but no remote,
Dad tousling my long, feathered hair, calling me Sally, Flower Child,
saying, “Since when do you wear a necklace?”
the gold, love seat with wooden handles that my parents lounged on,
naked or not,
our still-alive dog, Pepper, curled at their feet
while cigarette smoke plumed against the wood-panelling in broad tufts
as Johnny Cash walked the line
and I watched awake
my life crisping,
fully aware,
fear lurking like a water moccasin below the surface.
It’s a silly thing to do,
insane in a way, actually,
wanting to go back,
revert to such a broken, palsied yesteryear,
but maybe I’m like the spouse who,
beaten repeatedly,
still stays each morning,
frying eggs over a ripe-red stove,
somehow trained to bear it all,
bewildered yet trying to make sense of fate
and life
and all the horrors
drizzled in between.
I am nine,
watching my mother in the bathroom mirror
as she paints her lips
and brushes faint bronze crystals
across her face
like some flippant Picasso.
Here comes the spray of lilac deodorant under her arms.
Spritz of Black Diamonds perfume across the sternum.
Flip of a curl at the base of her Dolly Parton wig.
With a smile as wide as out-stretched bat wings,
she bends down to where I’m sitting on chilled linoleum tiles,
her sprouting cleavage and a lacy ruby-colored bra,
asking,
“You got a problem?”
This is her hundredth date in less than as many days,
while a hundred more await.
I shrug.
I always shrug when I’m in fear.
The days are like cordwood now,
dried to dust by a stubborn sun,
then magically lit up one summer night
by the gas can I use,
igniting the garage and house,
everything smoldering properly for once,
only leaving behind embers
and the screams of oncoming sirens
who seem to say, “What’s done is done.
The rest is up to you.”
It was the year Ali fought Frazier for the first time,
my brother home from the war, a bald eagle tattooed across his back,
something unsteady in his eyes
that reminded me of a comet shifting through fog.
Plumes of cigarette smoke fondled the ceiling
in the basement where a TV blared at the end of the padded bar,
a room of men with their jokes and husky coughing and musky odors.
I was twelve and having my first beer.
“Before the fight starts, tell us a story about Nam,” one of them asked.
On the television Smokin’ Joe had just come out of his dressing room,
Ali was air kissing the camera,
and a riot was overtaking my heart.
I watched my brother reach for the fifth of bourbon,
his fingers trembling,
his eyes on the move again.
“Come on, tell us!”
My brother took a swig that burned and refilled.
He thought for a moment, then said, “First, we killed all the children,”
while everyone laughed at that,
confusing fact with fiction,
horror with humor,
utterly unable to consider the unthinkable.
As if seeing through a cloudy prism,
my brother took in his friends’ tittering, their circus smiling faces,
before raising his glass to
the lemon-yellow bar light.
“To the fight,” he said
as everyone cheered.
Len Kuntz is an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans and the author of the story collection I’m Not Supposed to Be Here and Neither are You from Unknown Books. You can also find him at lenkuntz.blogspot.com
