Christmas in Palookaville
by Benjamin Reed

      
      
Dad always said
You could crush a good woman
Inside ten minutes
Flat

My small child’s eyes
across the dinner table
of mashed potatoes
saw smartly dressed
Lois Lanes
pulverized and screaming
inside heavy junkyard machinery
as their shopping bags and purses and briefcases
fell to the greasy ground,
my dad pulling the lever again
to make sure the job was done
And done right

But when I was twenty-one
I saw something different
as I stood in my apartment window
far from the shrieks of the junkyard
and looked down on the yellow glow
of a streetlamp in the falling snow
smoking Camels and drinking Bushmill’s
trying to think
warm thoughts

I saw a young smartly-dressed couple
hurry through the storm
arm in arm
and her shopping bag burst open
spilling Christmas on the ground
and they stopped
and went back to the bag
and knelt, together
and picked up the holiday

I watched them disappear
like they were in one of those
shakable glass globes
that somebody always gives me every Christmas
and I took another pull of the Bushmill’s
and thought
Who knows?
Maybe I’m the one shaking this globe

And then I knew
that we could all live and die
and be crushed flat
inside ten minutes
and then I remembered
that even though my mother fled my father
she left the dog behind
who never failed to snap at his heels.

Benjamin Reed's poetry and prose have appeared in print in Mobius, Blue Mesa Review, Snow Monkey, and Taj Mahal, and online at WordRiot, Slow Trains, and Ascent. Word Riot and Slow Trains have also selected his work for their print anthologies, and he has recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.