Today's poem is by Joshua Michael Stewart

Americana
       

Wayne was a child when his father cooked
something up with a white nightgown, and burned

to death after crashing his car into a bridge.
Wayne spent rainy hours listening to bluegrass and blues

on a radio with a missing dial knob. His sister Ronda
thought Lenny Bruce was the funniest man in the world.

His mother tossed chopped onions into a hot skillet.
His father never had enough syrup for his pancakes.

Wayne had been hanging around with some guys
he'd gone to school with when he gunned down

a hustler in a poolroom. His mother had the wild
beauty of a goose. The homicide detectives waited

for her soft face to answer some hard questions.
Wayne learned early to wail on the fiddle. Passion

and hate slept together in his childhood home.
He shaved off his beard, bummed a few cigarettes

off his mother, and jumped a train headed west.
At fifteen, Ronda ran off with her trucker boyfriend,

and Mother spent her days preaching bible verses
to the ghost creaking her floorboards and slamming

her doors. She never forgave the blonde who danced
with her husband with the heat of a hot knife to butter.

Wayne doesn't stay in one spot long. He earns his sausage
by playing old-timey music festivals and square dances,

and Cajun fiddle when he wanders into French-Creole country.
His mother doesn't risk turning on the lights. She's cut out

the ghost's tongue and demands that it sings. A blowfly
grooms himself on a dumpster behind the pancake house.

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Copyright © 2023 Joshua Michael Stewart All rights reserved
from Love Something
Main Street Rag
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission