Larry, Moe, and me
by Craig
Kirchner
Panhandlers in
Ocean City
awaiting draft
physicals on Ninth Street—
never really owing
what we didn’t have,
and what else is
there.
Attic rooms on
Third St.,
cold shower stall
in the yard,
2x4’s of worn
white paint and body odor.
We stole
cigarettes from Ding Bell’s
and wine money
from pocketbooks.
Moe surfed the big
board,
never tilted
pinball and cheated at cards.
Tuesdays Larry
shagged the landlady.
She lived on the
first floor and had a TV.
We watched Sirhan
and Westmoreland
while her tits
bounced.
She had a freckled
throat,
and feverish flush—
her sofa smelled
of coconut and cum.
Mondays and
Wednesdays
I’d meet Muriel
after her shift at
Phillips Crab
House.
She
was slightly plump,
with
underaged baby fat,
peachy
locomotive skin and
long
straight blonde hair full of August sun.
She
loved dry-humping,
and
smelled like piecrust and Old Bay.
Thursdays
the Steakhouse had all you could eat.
Weekends
were parties in the dunes.
We
were barefoot and free,
like
wind-tossed kites above the beach,
indifferent,
invincible
but
fragile if touched,
denying
such wreckage falling to the sand,
the
summer was ours
and
there really was nothing else.
Craig
Kirchner is retired and thinks of poetry as hobo art. He loves storytelling and
the aesthetics of the paper and pen.
He
has had
two poems nominated for the Pushcart, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of
Navels. He houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems in a folder
on a laptop. These words tend to keep him straight.
After
a
writing hiatus he was recently published in Poetry Quarterly, Decadent
Review, New World
Writing, Neologism, The Light Ekphrastic, Unlikely Stories, Wild Violet, Last
Stanza, Unbroken, W-Poesis, The Globe Review, Skinny, Your Impossible Voice,
Fairfield Scribes, Spillwords, WitCraft, Bombfire, Ink in Thirds, Ginosko, Last
Leaves, Literary Heist, Blotter, Quail Bell , Ariel Chart, Lit
Shark, Gas, Teach-Write, and has work forthcoming in Cape, Scars,
Yellow Mama, Rundelania, Flora Fiction, Young Ravens, Loud Coffee Press,
Versification, Vine Leaf Press, Edge of Humanity and the Journal of Expressive
Writing.
