The stout amber beer bottle squats like a sentry on the red and white enamel kitchen table and your wounds begin to weep again. The heavy sigh of your father hangs in the air like a thought, incomplete, an ancient curse that fails to land. The tall glass holds the golden elixir that draws the line between curdled sentimentality and spiteful memory. His strident stare affords everyone time to scatter as he is lost in thoughts of past indiscretions, thrice a year indulgences, violet colored contusions from a wicked fall from grace. Ancestors wring their hands, because somewhere , not here, there is a moon and it is full. You lace your shoes, turn your collar up and jingle the coins in your pocket like amulets. Every tick of the clock brings a tragic story, even this one, to an eventual end.
Michelle Reale is the author of Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and In the Blink of a Mottled Eye (Kelsay Books, 2020) among others. She is the Founding and Managing Editor of Ovunque Siamo: New Italian-American Writing. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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