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Firm Against the Pattern
When I saw Charity dancing alone in the farmhouse kitchen, eyes closed, lips parted, held aloft in one hand half a mango, a gigantic butcher knife clutched in the other—I froze at the screen door as I always do when I come upon someone praying.
All night I had been hitting on the daughter of a tiny woman orphaned by Hiroshima. Her grandparents had been lost, and her mother would soon be dead though no one knew if it was the blast or the facility she retired next to in Utah.
This was the kind of bitter irony that made you want to burn the flag— even if it was against the law, even on the Fourth of July on property owned by a Republican state senator. Which is precisely what would happen later, after we’d drunk the wine.
Hey, he said in one of those voices unique to fraternity members high on nitrous oxide, Anybody want a drink of hundred-year-old Romanian wine? Before we could answer, he had produced from one of the pockets on his wheel chair wine he meted out, so help me God, from a Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle.
By the time that bottle made its way around the bonfire, I was drunk on kimonos wed to atom bombs and motherless children left to cultivate an excruciating beauty, drunk on crippled tipplers scarcely larger than dolls. On an evening such as this, one swig makes little difference.
Like the wine my father fashioned out of blackberries, out of plums, it was sweet and very strong and it wouldn’t have taken much to turn Mrs. Butterworth upside down until her skirts fell and I’d forgotten that the cloud above Nagasaki rhymes with the flag we raised on the moon.
As I watched Charity dance, I rested my brow against the rusty screen and that knife and mango might have been a bottle and a beating heart, a bomb and a burned up baby doll, a flag and whatever comes to mind when you read the word forgiveness.
Closing my eyes, I extended my tongue and pressed it firm against the pattern: I tasted yesterday’s rain, the forgotten carcasses of moths, broken glances, rebel tears, the smoke of not-so-distant fires— all those delicate gestures we collect and call the seasons.
Brett Eugene Ralph.
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Brett Eugene Ralph spent the better part of his youth in Louisville, Kentucky, playing football and singing in punk rock bands. His work has appeared in publications such as Conduit, Mudfish, Willow Springs, and The American Poetry Review, and his poems have been anthologized in The McSweeny's Book of Poets Picking Poets and The Stiffest of the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Missouri State University, and the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies in the Himalayas of northern India. Currently, he lives in Empire, Kentucky, and teaches at Hopkinsville Community College. His country rock ensemble, Brett Eugene Ralph's Kentucky Chrome Revue, can be heard in seedy dives throughout the South.
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:hi:
RL
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