Our open mic band of poets is searching for a new home. On Monday, October 6, we met as we had the previous month, in Ada’s Wintersmith Park.

The Night Always Seems to Win

by Richard R. Barron

Memories of being a sick child, laying on a couch made up with sheets and blankets, the coffee table strewn with thermometers and plastic cups half full of flat Sprite

Of endless hours in the emergency room with my wife, my eyes tired from the dark, darting eyes of sick strangers in the shadows

Of the racket of late night war movies echoing through my father’s cigarette smoke

Of ice cold rain on a muddy sideline in Novmeber

Of staring in silence at another blank journal page, hoping the words will just appear

Then

Of riding in the passenger seat of my not-yet girlfriend’s sister’s Jaguar, out driving in the country just to be driving in the country

Of the windows and the sunroof letting in the stale, dusty midnight summer air that flaps and howls in our hair

Of the cassette in the stereo playing U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, fluffed by the noise of the wind

Of the darkness as we fly south on State Highway 99 past towns called Bowlegs and Little and Wolf and Vamoosa

And she

She hasn’t found herself yet, or hasn’t decided yet who she is. I try to take her hand and she has no idea how to hold my hand

Neither she nor I have figured out that we are rushing headlong down that highway on a two-year slide to a hard breakup

But that night, those nights, the dust, the wind, the music, our hands, and the two of us who know nothing

So dark