Michael Catherwood

Be Ready

Nazis parade
in Ohio, masked, carrying 
blood-red swastikas. 

Time unwinds
like a runaway
bus, full of goofball 

tricksters, mean-ass 
plump guys and dead-end
duds. We wait

at the bus stop, our hands
in our coat pockets,
grin into the blue sky,

kick the gray pavement
like a single lung 
motorcycle, waiting. 
	
There’s more to come:
blood and tired cliches,
disappointed drunks

on the edge of town, sad
children scared at school desks,
mothers hold steering

wheels in a death grip,
romantic couples 
blow through STOP signs

flecked with bullet holes…
Don’t believe it?
Nazis parade 

in Columbus, Ohio, proud 
and mean
and faceless behind masks.


Forgot Store # 3
    
“I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. 
         		I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony
         		of stars.” ––Rumi

So, I rode my Glide
by the Forgot Store Bar
and bikers had parked 
their blacked-out Harleys
out back, and now playing
cornhole,
                while an empty
tour bus 
              puffed fumes 
on the road, 
idling, the scene 
out of rural Texas, 
or backroads of Arkansas,
but not in Texas. 
or in the cotton-
thick Delta. 
                   In Nebraska,
a yell from Omaha. 
The Forgot has been
ruralfied, my gents.

And as I rolled
down the narrow 
blacktop road, an old guy, 
who looked like LBJ,
drove his golf cart, 
a cigar stuck in his lip
cart weaving,
                      the Stars 
and Stripes
flapping proudly. My…
I suppose
                 a Trump 
flag, circa 2016,
waved as an echo 
on the other side, 
but I watched
his meandering 
path 
           on and off
the grassy knoll.

The Forgot Store Bar
                                   has died.

 

 

Michael Catherwood’s books are Dare, If You Turned Around Quickly, Projector, from Stephen F. Austin Press, and Near Misses from WSC Press. He’s former editor at The Backwaters Press, and he has been Associate Editor at Plainsongs since 1995. Recent poems have appeared in As It Ought to Be Magazine, The Common, The Corpus Callosum, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Misfit Magazine, The Opiate, Pennsylvania English, and Zoetic Press. He’s a cancer survivor, retired, and lives in Omaha with his wife, Cindy.