Lousy Food And Warm Beer
Beads of raspberry paletta sink onto the tips of my fingers
Creating a bright film of sugary madness.
Watch a rugged man take a drag from his white cigarette
Pausing
Rolling the blanketed tobacco between fingertips
Exhaling
Smoke billows
A column of dream.
Bandana, an indigo color
with a black tail of paisley.
Wrapped cloth sits precariously
On sunburned ears
Shirt boasts:
“Fishermen’s day in Stonington: nineteen ninety one”
“Day” barely
A splatter of paint
From when he worked
on Old Burt Beeson’s cottage.
Smokes the butt down to a nub
Dropping it carefully
Stomping it to a fine grey ash.
Paisley reassured,
he enters the shingled pub
whose vinyl sign promises,
“Lousy Food and Warm Beer”.
When Crimson Fled
Met a man today
who didn’t win the lottery.
Scratched three silver extensions
on shiny purple cards
Then bit his lip so hard that
crimson fled.
Banged the side of his
dented champagne
colored
1978 Toyota Corolla
Car his father lent him
when he got laid off.
Threw the parchments of Providence
into a cosmic abyss
where waste lies with no destination
but barges
and hills
and fields
where sea gulls pray.
Shook his two iced teas hard
Gold Peaks
he bought at
Hess Express
they appealed to him when he
saw glittering pieces of possibility
lining the green colored wall
Now
the concentrated sweetness
repulses him.
Told him
I’ll buy the album you say no one will,
supply the pencils for your
lump charcoal lyrics
hard to swallow,
we can chew
peppery sunflower seeds
together
because they taste like
the filet mignon
that we can’t afford.
Olivia Vande Woude is a junior at St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, VA. She has been writing stories for most of her life, and has recently focused her attention on writing poetry. She attended the New England Young Writers Conference and has recently been selected to read her work at the Virginia Festival of the Book. She is currently a member of Tupelo Press Teen Writing Center, where she is co-editor of the Crossroads Anthology.
–Art by Karamelo
–Art by Mariya Petrova-Existencia