Vinegar Pie

There was no show business in my hometown.
There was showing off, all right, plenty of that,
so I don’t suppose anybody needed acting lessons,
you know, but we weren’t brought up to think showing
off and business went together, although clearly, they do.

How could everybody be having an amazing time? And
when did awesome replace fine and dandy? Can you tell
me that? Because, all this enthusiasm just doesn’t make
sense, not that I’m into singing the mockingbird blues.
I sometimes think we all got lost on the hallelujah trail.

I wanted a house on Chihuahua Street just like everyone else.
I was ready for a four-door sedan. While my friends ordered beer,
I bought a box of Dots. I had a ten-year-old’s imagination.
My favorite flavor was cherry. I wasn’t old enough to be
ashamed to say so, although I was old enough to be ashamed.

I just wanted my Mamma to be an independent woman who’s
got it going on, but people I knew didn’t have enough money
to have it going on. Nobody I knew had it going on, not even or,
especially not, the men. About all they had going on were the dog
races across the river.

That, and maybe some weed but, back then, it wouldn’t have
been any good. It was all home grown. Folks now call themselves
white because they keep nice towels in their three-bedroom houses.
When I was a kid, not that many blacks had that, so having all that
went to the heads of the ones who did.

Whites got all full of themselves is what happened. The towels
weren’t meant for drying yourself; they were just for show, like
the living room furniture. Blacks had furniture all right, but it
was for sitting on. Is it any wonder Anna Mae Bullock didn’t
want to pick cotton? Didn’t wanna? Wasn’t gonna.

Who could blame her, poor thing? Bless her little heart. That’s
what I say. I just hope now to be surrounded by worthy successors
to Juvenal. Because I find myself in a state of quizzical dismay.
I really do. Eating pho and sushi doesn’t do much to change
the profile of our increasingly late-Rome-like American times.

I don’t mind telling you I am just stunned and discouraged
by the absurd and debauched spectacles before me. It puts
me in mind of St. Louis. That’s right: T. S. Eliot, Miles Davis,
Anna Mae and her violent beau, even that dull writer, Jonathan
Franzen.

Green rules! It’s a miracle we’re here! I’m trying to write a song
around that. Can anybody listen to Porgy and Bess and still say
life is a shit sandwich? The Shirelles! I should say not. We seek
to arrange the rhythms of our disgruntlement in stabilizing stanzas.
‘Course there is nothing a nice slice of vinegar pie can’t cure.

David Lohrey’s plays have been produced in Switzerland, Canada, and Lithuania. His poems can be found at Dead Mule, Expat Press, Terror House, and Modern Literature, along with the University of Alabama, Illinois State, and Michigan State University. His fiction appears in Storgy Magazine, Terror House Magazine, and Literally Stories. David’s first collection of poetry, Machiavelli’s Backyard, was published in 2017. His newest collection, Bluff City, appeared this month, published by Terror House Press. lohr_burgh@hotmail.com