Alone, Drinking with the Tickfaw River

--Alison Pelegrin

Featherweight lawn chair, cooler for a footrest,

and me a squatter on the landlord's dock

where baitstealers teased a thousand times a day

until rowdy boats and summer scared them deep.

Day and night I snoozed on the porch

beneath a filthy orbit of fanblades

to the opera of my neighbors fighting

and reconciling in the glow of stolen wattage.

I saw them swimming once. Maybe naked,

judging from their skittish talk, but the water

smeared their bodies' pale particulars.

It was just me and the Tickfaw River.

Me with the taste of a tin can in my mouth,

feeling no pain, lighting a cigarette backwards,

the Tickfaw tricking me closer and closer

with echoes and music out of nowhere.

Is it funny that I was too lit to notice

twenty-five orange yards of extension cord

stretching from my outlet, over the driveway shells,

to feed the hungry plug of their deep freezer? 

Mother would have pitched a fit if she discovered

the stash of whiskey in the woodpile,

and my father wasn't laughing

if he looked down from his company of stars.