By Tom Lagasse
“He doesn’t know his own sentence?” “No,” said the Officer once more. - Franz Kafka - The Penal Colony
During the summer
the boys played
tennis ball in the street,
and the girls were
mostly invisible.
The wives stayed home to
tend the house, clip coupons
and care for their children.
They sent their husbands off
to work with a brimming lunchbox
and an abiding sense of duty.
They reinforced
wealth wasn’t everything
while stretching paychecks
with grit and grace to make
them last until next Thursday.
In plastic pitchers they made
Kool-Aid or powdered milk
and poured them into gas
station glasses, free with a fill-up.
At night they fingered
the pages of the Sears
Wish Book.
On the weekends
the neighborhood smelled
of hot dogs, save the rare
exception when the rich
aroma of burning fat from
steak sizzling on the backyard
grill, made of pressed metal
most likely purchased with Green
Stamps or from Woolworths,
Bradlees, or Caldors,
and spoke to our hunger,
wafted through the warm air.
At dusk the children
and their parents
cooled down, gathering
on the front steps to escape
the stifling summer
heat accumulated inside
and the din of window fans.
The men who had worked long hours
feeding the production lines
Making their incremental contributions
to jet engines or cars, building
the foundations or skeletons
for corporate headquarters
they hoped one day their sons
or daughters would inhabit.
With a blinding faithfulness
like religion or a steady paycheck,
they believed this was the salvation
of their families’ lives and better
than the ones their parents fled.
After work, in the quiet solitude
away from the front yard ruckus
the men sat alone segregated in
their postage-stamp backyard
domains. They leaned back
in their frayed nylon-strapped
folding chairs surrounded
by the spoils of childhood -
bicycles, balls, and bats.
They peeled sweaty cans of Black
Label, Budweiser, Narragansett,
Blue Ribbon … any beer
that was on sale that day
from the plastic ring
that held them together.
They downed six doses
of their cheap miracle
drug at first to quench
their thirst and eventually
to fuzz the edges of time.
As the sun dipped closer
to the horizon, the exhausted
men fought sleep and the dreamless
darkness awaiting them. Unwitting
conspirators trying to survive
the modern machine that was
too far along to stop.
Tom Lagasse’s poetry has appeared in Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, The Silver Birch Poetry Series, Freshwater Literary Journal, The Eunoia Review, and in numerous anthologies. He was a 2024 Artist in Residence at the Edwin Way Teale House at Trail Wood. He lives in Bristol, CT.