Impressions​

Issue 18

My daughter, ponytails swinging
walking across the kitchen,
sandwich in hand
drops it
and steps on it--
 
She bends down, picks it up,
inspects it
and without hesitation, begins to eat it.
 
I ask, "Would you have eaten it if I had stepped on it?"
"No, that wouldn't have been the same," she replies.
 
"I know where my foot has been."
 
The imprint on the sandwich is real:
two familiar toes stamped into what she is willing to eat--
 
The floor, however, is different, Bukowski:
a gruff old man with a stubbly beard,
a cigarette drooping from his lips
the smell of whiskey,
him singing, "What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor."
 
She taking no notice of him,
waves goodbye to me,
undisturbed, she hops on one foot--
without looking down
stomps across him
out of the kitchen
chewing—playing hopscotch
back to her bedroom.
 
The floor rolls over
mired in a drunken stupor,
shrouded in a puff of cigarette smoke,
mumbling incoherently,
hungover--
and likely not to remember a thing.
 
I step over him
the smell of whiskey whispering from his breath,
wipe a little mustard off his chin
and let him sleep it off.

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SCOTT SHARPE loves to write poetry that makes the banal collide with the world just beyond our grasp. He has been published in Workers Write!, Comical Cadence and Pretty Near Poems for Humor Consumers and Irony Buffs, among others.
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