Alex Stolis

The Wonder Years
Nixon Sends Combat Forces to Cambodia

First day of Spring. Days feeling longer but going by faster. The bartender’s name is Firpo. Mid-thirties but to a kid of 8-9 he looks 50-60, boxer’s forearms, white hair, round face, and an unlit half smoked cigar in his mouth. He’s dunking bar glasses in a sink filled with soapy water:

Shot glasses
Rocks glasses
Pilsners
High Balls

Paradise can almost taste the smell of cigarette smoke, sweet beer, and stale perfume. He takes a dime off the bar, slides off the barstool, walks over to the jukebox. Drops the dime in, punches C-23, the opening riff of Mrs. Robinson starts just as Firpo says time for school kid. Firpo is wiping down the clean, wet bar glasses:

High Ball
Pilsner
Rocks
Shot

Paradise wonders where his father’s gone.
Squints his eyes in anticipation of the sun.
Pushes the door open with both hands.

There appears a flight of dragons without heads
It is a dream he’s had before, it’s a performance
from God, so he imagines.

It’s an undead morning, a shimmer of moon escapes
from the horizon. There are reds, orange, a flash
of blue.

The Wonder Years
Paradise Remembers Paul McCartney Announces The Beatles Have Disbanded

The grandmother speaks broken English. Paradise has never seen her in anything but an apron because she is always cooking/baking/canning/cleaning something.

The sky is higher here, air smells of freshly washed sheets. The buzz from a hornets nest in the eaves mingles with birdsong.

Paradise thinks; this is what loneliness feels like; straight, square, a great blank space with no purpose.

A small girl is stung by a hornet. He remembers a first kiss, a spider tattoo on the back of her wrist. The girl is red-faced, crying. The grandmother kneels, dabs away tears with her apron.

The clouds are a circus on parade
giraffe, monkey, headless lion, emaciated tiger.

There is nothing left to say, nothing inside

Paradise closes his eyes tight, sees shooting stars.
Sees the girl with the tattoo, sees his sister drowning.
Sees the hornet crawl into a crack in the sky.

He becomes dizzy with remembering watches rain
tumble to earth. Time does not touch him, there are no
end dates carved into stone.

Clouds spill into rivers flowing into endless oceans,
the rumble of a train wakes him. The dead never loved
him enough to tell him anything true.

The Wonder Years
Paradise Remembers Prisoners Seize Hostages, Take Over Jail in Queens

It was the Wild Wild West, it was rain that never stopped, a cold blanket of wind from the Lake covered everything. Kids down by the Coolerator huffed paint and smoked homegrown, the rumble of secrets left an unbroken loneliness on them.

They were living their past, owned it, bought, and paid for it. Paradise didn’t like the sight of blood. He couldn’t escape it; at the end of every fist every sharp word cut after cut. Everyone has a different story all with the same soundtrack the same ending the same.

Paradise dreams he is a ghost, makes himself invisible. Listens to the tick tick   tick as the engine cools. Closes his eyes and remembers the scent of her hair, the moon hanging full and ready to burst. Wishes for one last first chance.

The river is impassive, kids tag the abandoned buildings with crude cocks and tits. Crow opens his eyes. How can they live without their lives? How will they know who they are without their past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

  We’re Budweiser and Benzedrine. Molson Ice and Percocet.
  We’re all out of cigarettes.

Paradise dreams his bones are laid out in a field of yellow.
There are black birds sitting in a crooked tree.
He watches her dance; a slow-motion suicide note.

Every hollow fragment of memory he has ever needed
is filled in with made-up stories and make-believe endings.
He becomes a color by number accident that never happened.

The mercury drops. It’s a day for breath to freeze in his lungs,
for the earth to be solid, real; a day for the cold to make him
remember.

 

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis, His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press.