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Ephraim Scott Sommers: I Won’t Be Able to Say This      When I’m Dead

October 25, 2016 by PBQ

                                       You know 
I will get what I deserve for this— 
Tristan’s always been the sucker-puncher 
who spent every evening trashcan-bowling 
his rummed-up Cutlass around A-town 
with the devil in his ear bud. He peed 
on every coffee table that wasn’t his, 
and when the branch snapped like a skateboard 
in the middle of the Mardi Gras party, 
when he fell from a tree three-stories- 
high, when he smashed two vertebrae,   
everyone thought he deserved it. 
He champagne-bottled my neighbor’s right eye, 
a scar forever, and bailed, and left me 
with a broken window, with a mag-lite 
in my bedroom, two cops rousting me 
awake, two cops I lied to for him, to them 
I’d never heard of Tristan, and now I’m thinking  
about my neighbor with a scar and no one 
to own it. I think about that face 
Tristan and I didn’t have to live with.  
That was two weeks before he jumped 
for that tree. I remember that same old Tristan 
and all of us backing him. People thought 
he deserved to be broken, but I never told him 
when I came to see him in the hospital. 
The words wanted to speak for themselves, 
and now I will let them, the “get well” balloons  
hugging close the linoleum, the room laughing 
when he told us he thought he could fly, 
the room saying I am glad he didn’t get drunk 
and die, and now saying we had been hoping 
an ambulance would find him and stop him 
because we couldn’t, and now everyone  
in town is waiting for a big enough fall. 
Tonight, the Plaskett Creek campground 
whispering behind him, he can’t hear  
my fist in my pocket, a key jutting out 
between each finger. After eleven years, 
I might finally receive some elbow 
or foreign object to the eye-brow, 
and I should get what I deserve for my dreaming 
tonight I’m the best I’ve ever been,  
and I’ve been ready to have my cheekbones  
knuckled for that, but the whole campground 
heavy-foots toward us, and as if I am nineteen 
again, in the name of Atascadero and justice 
and childhood, I duck into my tent 
while they bash Tristan’s ribs in.

Filed Under: Contributors 94, Issue 94, Poetry, Poetry 94 Tagged With: Contributors 94, Ephraim Scott Sommers, Poetry, Poetry 94

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