Dave Revisits the Boyhood Home​

Issue 18

The smoke house still stands.
It's been years since pork hung low,
cooked slow, over its green wood fire.
But you can still smell that
smoldering grunter through cracks
in the walls, or under the eaves.
"It's amazing what lingers,"
you say, this plain wooden shack
restoring more of the past to you
than a dozen albums worth
of faded photographs.
"Used to be out hideout in the summer,"
you continue, "despite the
rancid odor of last winter's meat."
 
The family that own the farm now
haven't bothered to raze
that ramshackle building.
Maybe they figure, like you,
it will fall down in its time.
You sit on the porch, share
coffee and cookies with these strangers,
thumb through the faces in
the snapshots you bring,
though its the backgrounds
that corral their curiosity
not the faces.
They enjoy hearing the history
of the place as much as you do telling it.
Yes, their son too almost drowned in the dam.
 
You tell them just how much
depended on the fate of that long smoking pig.
Anything went wrong and the
family might not eat.
Nothing was a stake in a photograph.
You survive at their behest,
but not at their mercy.

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JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Novus and Calliope. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.
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