IF I REMEMBER RIGHT

 

We were drinking Knickerbocker Beers

smoking Lucky's, Pagan's older brother

was out on some sort of weekend release furlough

good behavior program, had somehow managed to

weasel his way into at Rikers.

Him sentenced there six months earlier,

two to five for armed robbery, his head shaved now

like one of those dopey G I’s you'd see on TV

each night being airlifted, legs blown off.

 

Cookie, his cousin, borrowed or stole, depending on

how you looked at it, his father’s red Lincoln suicide doors,

and we heading for a hamburger joint on Long Island

that had five cent burgers, us asking for five hundred

of them like it was nothing, but they didn't bat an eye.

 

We were just some kids from Brooklyn buying 500 burgers!

and “that'll be twenty-five dollars, please,” she said,

and “oh, do you want ketchup on the side?”

 

Then Pagan pulled the gun. 

Michael P. Lefanto lives in Brooklyn NY as a retired laborer. He’s a husband, father, and grandfather, who has been writing poetry forty plus years.

Dance to Death, Issue VII

©2008 Sorrowland Press and all respective artists within.