line stretched outside the grocery store doors

speed bumps hold thru traffic
like state fair lines
before Garth Brookes broke bad
"anybody need pharmacy?
anybody just here for pills?"

The child riding two carts up
plays mama like a top,
drops a bright green
hollow piece of plastic
artillery, cries
her out of an i-phone reverie.
she picks it up
and picks it up
and picks it up again.

a burst of sun off a bald man's
cabeza
(who could be many bald men)
produces what seems to be
soul beams bursting from within.
this cues advancement.

Weed is Illegal in Texas

Today is Wednesday, March 18th, 2020. 

Harlingen, Texas is a southern city 

near the border of Mexico. 

I can’t describe it 

because I don’t love it.

a late life step parent 

I don’t see it  

because I've not let it settle, 

so I get lost.  I don’t know how the roads intersect.

but it matters where you live

you see

what you allow yourself to see. 

the handshake is impossible to turn down. 

he opened himself up for a hug. 

my wife hugged him. 

but he won’t sit down

We both said thank you, bowing, 

hands clasped in prayer. 

Thank you once more 

plus one fifty.

bowing like he’s

my shallow comprehension of 

the Dalai lama

deep, soulful eyes.

lips do

part just enough 

to guess that 

at rest, 

he is fully empty of thought

everybody ends different

we all get a taste to begin with
but who makes it to the end
has done
because of what’s been done
thanks to grandma’s swollen clitoris.
granddaddy was no great heart breaker,
as the stories allude,
but knew where on grandma’s vellum cheek to place his hard hand

had grandma not got cocky
on mason jar shine,
tablespoon at a time,
for she had what aunt Gladys diagnosed

 strange iteration of addiction,
clothed in small doses

would have saved my daddy’s ass,
on that dreamy Indiana post-Christmas blow out,
from the boys in the Plymouth, laid off from AC Delco,
the only game in town.

slowed to idle reverse lights up
he squirt a piss blossom on the crotch of his brand new blue dickies,
temple pulsed
hummingbird edging
in unison with a softly exhaled ‘fuck’

the boys in that Plymouth,
red lined at night.
knuckles and toes on foreign bones.
mom not saying a goddam thing,
when that sonofabitch moved in,
he had a bottle but no cups
he put on records, a different side he said.
they got drunk,
sonofabitch asked him if he ever

 tire iron boy held head high
out the window as the Plymouth
reversed in my old man’s direction
That's what made my daddy run.
I give thanks
to egregious american consumption
for providing causality and figurative language
to explain my eventual conception.