Drums on Vinyl Counters

by S. Brady Tucker

Doom, Doom, Doom,
this simple constancy,
this doomed shade
of civilization, this
clutter of meat and
concrete and blood,
mortar, bone.

This is a town just
waking up into a city;
the streets blink their
surprise in pulses of rose
light, the sewers mouth
rank words that smell
of rotting bacon and old
mushrooms, they say, “We
will eat the sky and the earth,
all you bring to us,”
from the iron grates.

I am absolutely nowhere,
watching this town
mature into a city.
Remember, it is Sunday
morning and the streets
are filling with hung over
men and women, congested
and backpacked in oily
jackets. Importantly, they
are not going to church.

Then the streets are suddenly empty,
like eggshells next to iron skillets,
and this town (Edinburg?)
reeks of greasy diner plates
with three pound coffees and
four pound bagels, the same old
bagels they have always
been. Outside, women are going

to church now, in tight
leopard print pants and fur
coats, and the men, I swear I can
smell the darkness of morning
sex, the sweat septic and
chlorinated and swollen—
an array of gray gents
and their oily semen.

I am alone here and godless, among
these lost specters of religion,
and as I write this last line
I feel an erection burning: me, alone
in a techno café—a hardened American
prick in a town that feels more and more
like a city, and twice as empty
as before.

And The Way The Sun Was Positioned

by S. Brady Tucker

I thought you were smoking a cigarette—
just kicking back for the moment, against
the warm metal of a deuce and a half
truck, in the shade. There were puddles
of oil running from underneath the truck,
leaking from bullet holes where rounds
had pierced the engine block. Your leg
was wet from one large ebony puddle, but
we were all dirty then, so it didn’t seem to
matter.

Your M-16 was across your chest, and your
forearm was draped over the handgrip
in such a comfortable manner, I thought
for a moment you were asleep. So I just sat
down by your side. I hadn’t eaten yet, so
I tore open an MRE, threw the sealed package
of beef, dehydrated away and began to
eat the peanut butter on the dry crackers.
You were looking back over the low ridge,
where smoke seemed to be oozing from the
pores of the earth in spurts. And I thought
that dying would be easy now, like sunshine
is easy, or hammocks. I thought that
after what we had seen and done that day
that everything after would be a piece of cake.

But I wasn’t ready to go back, over that ridge
you were looking at, over to where bodies
held on to metal like scorpions hold onto
flying beetles. Back there, I wasn’t ready
to go, and I was glad for you being there, and
I wanted to tell you so. I said, “Danny.”
and you hitched like you were about to
vomit. And you turned and looked at me,
and I could see the cigarette in your hand,
how it was ashes down to the filter,
and how the oil (you said it, ‘ole’)
didn’t look so much like oil anymore,
and how your eyes seemed gray with your
skin, and all I wanted right then
was a burning cigarette so bad.

Whirligig

by S. Brady Tucker

The Dead:

When he is alone, in an
easy chair, say, or in the dark,
under a raspberry jam night sky, sitting
on his oak deck, he hears them:

he hears them whisper their jealousy—
just that. They whisper their hatred of his life
and the world simmers with a heat
and guilt terrible to see and he is not

alone for a moment, but awfully
surrounded by them again, and he
knows what they mean when they
say those words, and his blood red and blue

from heart to arteries to veins
beats like syrup and he is there
again, his knee in the sand, his tan
desert combat boots dug in as if

rooted there, and he hears again the
sound of them whispering with the voices
of bullets popping and whirring and
thumping flesh, and he hears them

roar their fear so loud and awful
and terrible that his weapon falls to his
feet and his gloved hands hold bloody
chunks of sand against his ears

to drown out the sound of it all. When
it is over, he shakes the sand out of
his baby fine blonde hair, and he picks
up his discarded weapon. To the east, bombs

and bullets still purr as a war rends everything
he knows and every thing he ever will know.
When he is alone, they remind him:
“You will never be alone. Never.”

The Alive:

When there are other people around,
he knows that some of it isn’t
real—like how the feel of Erik’s
blood sticking to the black metal

of his weapon was real, or how the
oily smoke of Erik’s blood burned his
nostrils when his weapon overheated was real.
Real real. And he knows this is wrong

and he is as afraid of getting help
as he was in that desert when everything
went wrong in the world. So he pretends
that they are not a fiction, that they exist

like Erik’s severed foot existed still tied
into its boot—how it felt to pick up that
foot and place it in a pile of other things that
were Erik’s, and sometimes it even works for him.

Do you see why he thinks of the world like
proverbs in fortune cookies? “Burning flesh is
the smell of success!” or, “You are alive for some
obscure reason.” He smiles sometimes when

he thinks like this, but he knows it isn’t funny.
He knows that they will continue to whisper to
him for the rest of his life, and that he is doomed
and lost and cursed. No one will ever laugh with him

and no one will ever know the cowardice he is capable
of, and how Erik would be alive if it weren’t for him.
But know this: somehow, one night, he will know five minutes
of peace—just five minutes of life, as it should have been.