Roy J. Beckemeyer
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Peggy That whole summer she was half pain-in-the-ass, half Siamese twin. She was there when I dug night-crawlers, beat me at crawdad hunting, let loose a steady stream of trash talk about how girls could outdo boys at most anything they set their mind to. She was Jerry's cousin, visiting for the summer. The evening she arrived she spent all her time with us boys. Ignored our sisters. Proved she could cap sparrows under the eaves with a bb gun as well as any of us. From then on, she would show up whenever the mood moved her. By July her feet were brown as pine bark, her pink toenail polish worn away from wading the creek. She was like a burr half buried in sand. I would forget all about her, then she'd be sticking to me again, all bound up and prickly. Once, I was standing in the creek squeezing sand out from between my toes when she yelled my name. I looked up, shading my eyes with my hand because her head was haloed by sun. She pulled me back under the cut bank below the riffle, looked up at me for a second, then grinned and ducked past me, back into the shallow water and sunlight, kicking tracers of arcing water as she went. I can still see those brown eyes, deep as hickory hollows, dark and shiny as molasses. She left at the end of the summer, and though I never saw her again, I remember her clearly, all these years later. The creek has withered away, become thinly spread and thready across the landscape. Decades of soybeans have squeezed the dirt dry. But she remains that creature of summer, all loose-limbed energy and constant motion, half tomboy, half enigma, full of hints of mysterious changes. She is sandy creeks and cicada nights, skinned knees and allee-allee-in-free. She is the one who taught me that girls were people, too, but that some of them were also much, much more. ** This was first published in the author’s collection, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press.) ** Jim called himself a "big sumbitch." Cornpone version of Gable, hair slicked back, bristly mustache. Two of the prettiest black and tan coon hounds in the county. Had himself a passel of kids with Mandy. None of those little boys got weaned till first grade. I can still see the five-year-old stop off from playing, walk up to the card table, tug at Mandy's sleeve. She'd unbutton her dress top and pull out her tit and he'd stand, elbow on the table, head resting on his hand, busily sucking away all through the next hand of cards. They were of a height, Dad and Jim. Dad was a beanpole but all wire and sinew. Quite a pair - the thick and thin of it; ran trot lines together, sat in the front yard drinking beer in the lingering August twilight. Sent us kids off with beer pails in our wagon to fetch another round of Stag draft from La Paloma. Things broke off when Dad's blood went bad. Jim was not one who could be around sick folks or doctors. Nurses gave him the shakes. He wouldn't set foot in a hospital, even when Mandy was delivered of the kids. So when Dad had to go in, Jim stayed away. When we called everyone in town to ask if they'd give blood, Jim wouldn't even come to the phone. Let Mandy answer "You know Big Jim, he just can't abide needles." He didn't care for funeral parlours either, stayed out of church except on Sundays, wouldn't go near a cemetery. It was months after Dad had been set in the ground when I saw Jim again. Backing out his front door, sack of dog food under his arm, he saw me and stopped. Kind of hung his head. "Gotta feed the hounds," he said, then turned away, just a second too late to hide his big god-damned redneck tears. ** This was first published in the author’s collection, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press.) ** The Language of Summer "I am trying to learn a language, but I don’t know what it is..." K. L. Barron, "Hunting for Arrowheads" Understanding summer requires, first of all, an ever-increasing vocabulary of the infinite shades of green. Then along come all those flower colours with their strange accents and odd vowel sounds, and you find yourself having to dig deeper into summer's syntax. By the time July rolls around, you feel like a spelling bee contestant training for the nationals. Words rooted in six legs fly everywhere, and sentences arch as high in the air as the summer sun. Paragraph structure is looser in summer; whole chapters go bare footed and halter-topped, and page after page of kids are out of school. Even northern summers begin to sound as if they grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line. Fortunately, it is almost always bright enough to read summer's treatises, no matter how small and strange her fonts. By August we can speak her grammar as if we had been born in that hottest of months. We all call ourselves linguists by the time the equinox approaches. We are summer-fluent and flaunting our knowledge of her way with fricatives and glottal stops, even as she begins to brood, as she spends more and more time thinking things over before speaking. Once she goes September-silent, mid-November mute, we are already breaking out references and cramming to translate the stark sign language of winter. ** This was first published in the author’s collection, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press.) ** Forbidden Fruit 1 Tears were shed in Eden over mangos, I’d wager—certainly not for mundane apples. There was sun enough, water enough for tropical fare—else, why call it Paradiso? That snide snake would never have caught Eve off balance or suckered Adam, stumbling in his bare feet, with some crisp white pome fruit, ruby peel or not. Nectared honey-flesh and gold-blushed green-orange skin it would have been that slushed juice and pulp over their tongues as they bit at the bait. 2 Haunted to this day, we lost souls seek out statues in the naves of chapels, squint at plaques telling us their saints’ names, catalog each one’s special grace, each one’s particular blessings. We plead for intercession, all the while recalling how the forked tongue flicked, licked the sweet liquid that lingered on our mango-moistened lips. 3 To test for ripeness, you must hold a mango using just the tips of your fingers, thumb opposed to the four (why else would God have granted us such a boon?). Apply light pressure. Palpate. Feel for a springing beneath the yielding. No squishing, no holding firm, just enough of an elastic sort of softness. For perfection this ripe, you, too, would have embraced the burden of original sin. Admit it. Even now, your body gives you away: The flush of saliva from under your tongue. Saliva drenching your soft palate, glistening the silken inner linings of your mangoed cheeks. ** This was first published in the author’s collection, Stage Whispers (Meadlowlark Books.) ** Capture I have captured the butterfly flit of your heart here between my palms. I am ready to open the perfect-bound beating book of you. I feel you explore the boundaries of my whorled skin, my lifeline creases. Your caresses arc from diastolic to systolic. I am ready to receive you with a waft of inhalation, have you measure, with each stretching beat, the volume of my affection. Come, sum milliliters, microns, expand from the appressed space between my clasped hands to the universe surrounding my galaxies of molecules. Plumb my mitochondrial depths. Seek out how my soul intertwines around each of my cells and takes up residence there. I look up at the wide world surrounding us and know the mirrored inverse of that world is here within me. I offer you these poor metrics, these empty estimates, these inadequate assessments of the unbounded quantification of my love. ** This was first published in the author’s collection, Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press.) ** Relocation "I have been studying the migration / of the years..." Doug Ramspeck, "Winter Trance" The wind, it seems, does not affect the passage of time, the accounts of housewives, keening mad in prairie dugouts, notwithstanding. The stop-time animation of years and seasons that flicker on the inner screen of my eyelids in the intervals between bouts of sleep are never accompanied by a soundtrack of winds. No howls. No shriek of air rushing around the stepped corners of clapboard-sided houses. No murmur of clouds being herded past. Migratory the years may be, but they drift only one way: out, always southing silently, as if the words I fling at you and you at me are being decelerated by the unbelievably viscous flow of time. This traveling, this relocation through the long seasons of life proceeds apace; I feel rather than hear its wake: the parting of air leaves a hollow surrounding my heart that only the inrush of each succeeding breath can measure. ** This was first published in the author’s collection, Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press.) ** Roy J. Beckemeyer’s latest poetry collections include The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) and Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book was Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2015, 2020, and 2024) and for Best of the Net (2018) and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019. His author’s page is at royjbeckemeyer.com. |
