Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty-one
Winter 2009
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Summer of Hammers and Whiskey
Sara Tracey

I. June

Did we tear down that wall
with sledge hammers or bare hands?

Nights, we opened windows, sealed screens
with duct tape.  Morning spider webs

caught only dew.  A bathtub in the back yard.
Later, Daddy would burn the scrap,

dry-rot and tar paper,
but she was gone for the day, running

from the saw’s buzz and blistered fingers.
I pulled nails from two by fours. The coffee

can rusted and filled.  I lost count.
A bull frog floated in the cistern.


II. July

She wore a red racer back.  My suit
hand-me-down floral.  Loose

at the legs.  I asked her to hold my breath
while I went under.  We practiced

the dead man’s float, butterfly stroke.
Listened to water tangling our hair.

Across the drive, Queen Anne’s Lace,
buttercup, bloodroot.  Stained fingertips,

white petals.  I got lost in the woods,
found black walnuts, sphagnum moss.

She stretched out on the glider,
slid straps off her shoulders.


III.  August

We sat in the back seat of some boy’s
Camaro, short shorts and flannel,

bare bellies and toe rings.  She kissed
him behind the poultry barn. I rode the Scrambler,

third time that day.  Candy apples
and kettle corn, my fingers sticky, hers jammed

in his back pocket.  Ferris wheel lights
fading in the rearview mirror.

Back home, trash bags on windows,
box fans in doorways.  Drywall

and plywood, a carpenter’s pencil
on the bathroom sink.  She plastered

her walls with Bushmills labels,
kept a bottle under the bed.

About Sara Tracey

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