Still Lives with Whiskey Bottle
Peter Markus

you sing me another whiskey-twisted version
of the same old song and dance, a song our fathers
sang on those graveyard mornings thirty years ago
after working the midnight shift at Great Lakes Steel.
They could've or should've been brothers, our mothers
liked to say, the way they drank, shot for shot, the way
they stomped into town with ring-curled metal shavings
matted into hard-hat hair dusted a premature shade
of gray. But now, my old man, your old man, they don't
even talk, let alone drink together. Though you and I,
yeah, brother, we still talk, and drink, and shoot

ISBN 1-882983-31-9
41 pages/$6