My Grandma, Speaking of Meeting My Grandpa for the First Time in 1969
He was high with his brother and friends
that night—their corner of the bowling alley
reeked of grass.
The lights above their lane flicked
like lightning cracks in storms back home,
blurring the scuffed shapes of pins
ready to be knocked down
in a popping crash of thunder.
The song
hung in the air between us like smoke.
I leaned my shoulder blades against the bar,
cold can of Schlitz in hand, drinking
all of him in.
He sat on a black and white-cushioned bench,
legs skinny and lax as boiled linguini,
toned arms propping up his scrawny, war-
shaken body. He was sweating down
from his thick, black hair, just showing
on clean-shaven skin as the lights flicked again.
Cigarette smoke poured over me as I drank my beer,
but I imagined he smelled like sweat and oil,
that man-sweat that smells good.
Feel the beat within my heart.
They all laughed about nothing.
His laugh was the loudest, the hardest
sound coming out as a wheeze at the end.
He looked over at me and my friend on barstools,
cutting the laughter if only for a second,
my look stripping the hysterics from him.
His smile thinned, teeth just showing,
like he still does now if I look quick enough.
I finished my beer and imagined his smell again,
that smell of sweat and marijuana I knew
I wanted smothered into my skin that night.
Cody Shrum writes and edits things in Kansas City. He’s a huge nerd. Dog person? You betcha. His fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming from magazines such as BULL, Cleaver Magazine, Identity Theory, the Midwest Quarterly, and Rust + Moth. He received his MFA in fiction from UMKC, and he is a fiction editor at Identity Theory. Twitter/Instagram: @cshrumly Website: codyshrum.com
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