The Whiskey Monologues

Baisley Packard spends his New Year’s Eve
in the glow of Gloucester Street’s slow red light.
He shares fingers of scotch with his best friend,
Jack Sun, as they mourn the loneliness of old age.
Cheap swags of holiday tinsel hang from Baisley’s
wheelchair, rank with some dead girlfriend’s perfume.
He scrapes his mind to remember a name as
the memory of her, pulling gently, returns with a sigh.
Sally Dehbi, eyes like the hollowed-out husks of figs.
Brown, tempered with purple.
Careful hands reaching over Baisley’s dead-end
hips for a light, tracing his melted cheekbones
with the soft oval of her thumb.
Jack Sun, quiet and tightly bound
in his puffed nylon jacket,
remembers the arms he bore for America,
criticized for his thick Peking accent and cheap shoes.
“I am an American veteran,” he would defend,
mocked by youth with pockmarked smiles and lazy eyes.
Baisley first found Jack cornered outside the Stop-N-Shop 
by a group of bow-legged bastard boys, 
threatened the lot of them into submission 
with a drunken roar and a wave of his stub.
It made him angry and scared that men
like Jack could be threatened by children-
especially a man that had handled breezily
around napalm, fingered the triggers
of loaded guns like visiting sweethearts.
“Brothers look out for each other,”
Baisley explained when he sobered,
“I hope you’d do the same for me.”
Jack cried when he went home that night,
warm and blurry from Baisley’s paperbag scotch.
It was the first time Jack had felt ashamed of his weakness;
overcome at the thought of having a friend that understood.

Submitted by Bald Lies.

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