The Liquor Machine

Much like a baby he nurses from a bottle, sleeps at odd hours, and cannot master complete use of the toilet. When he vomits, though, there is no one to pat his back. (A poem.)

The Liquor Machine

 

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

-Samuel Johnson

 

There is a window nestled

between her ribs, first peek in blurry,

second revealing the red silhouette of a man.

He has beer bottle fists and chimney sweep lungs:

a short term machine.

The liver is an engine, pump-pumping, while

his smokestack trachea billows expletives

untruths, and sometimes half-digested food.

He has a one-track assembly line mind, a

linear thought process:

me, me, me.

 

Much like a baby he nurses from a bottle,

sleeps at odd hours,

and cannot master complete use of the toilet.

When he vomits, though, there is no one to pat his back.

 

There are sepia flickers like a vintage projector

shivering like butterfly wings on the pinks of her eyelids

Countdown…three-two-one:

He comes home one night, one of the few,

and she crawls up to him like

a pink mouse -eyes still shut-

rooting around for its mother

in the coils of a snake.

The next morning she wakes up

with vomit tangled in her hair like tinsel,

her small body still snuggled against his booze-hot skin:

Fin. Projector coughs, curtains close.

 

She remembers how he always left

his pants in the hallway,

the breadcrumbs to his German child of folklore.

They always preceded his body by a few feet;

sometimes one pant leg still looped

around a shoe-less foot. In the pockets

of his discarded jeans jingled coins,

which were like lost treasure to her,

unknowing of her father’s trade:

Jackson, Hamilton, and Lincoln

for Jim, Jack, and José.

Author's Note

Criticism and feedback very much appreciated!