Chad Albert Sellers

August 3rd

The sun rose again and hid the city indoors.
It was Saturday, we awoke to the hum
of a dusty box fan. Out the window,
a dog barked and grass sat parched in brown needles
praying for rain.
                    There was no one in the street to say
"Eat shit and die" or "He held her tiny body in his arms
and sang the same lullaby over and over."
               The sweat formed on our brows and salted our eyes.
We took turns in front of the fan hoping it would rid us
of the smell of our bodies.
We passed a bottle back and forth and cursed our lives.
               But what kind of lives did we expect?
Planes flew over distant mountains without us,
telephones rang in empty houses, cars drove
until they ran out of gas and rolled to quiet stops
on gravel roads. A woman went to the screen door
and called the name of her small child, gone now
17 years to the bustling graveyard of Detroit's streets.
               You sat next to me on the hardwood, your
long red hair clinging to your neck, your roaring laugh.
You tried to describe the sea as you had seen it
in Mexico, but it was gone, dried up into endless
mounds of salt. You told me how the waves
were green and broke into foam, leaving only their
sound. How you sat in a bar on the coast
one morning and let someone's young daughter
fill your chest pocket with slices of lemon and lime
until you smelled them on your hands, your money,
your sweat. How you emerged onto the beach
among the other tourists, a red-faced American perfumed
with citrus, an ordinary teenager become a gift.

Chicago, 1972

Early Saturday afternoon in the summer before
Nixon would be reelected, Carl and I gazed
from the ninth floor of the Radisson
out onto Lake Michigan.

Carl had turned sixteen the week before, we drove
his white Mercury Marquis six hours
on a whim and spent my whole
Kmart paycheck for the room.

We had just shaved and patted our faces
with the complimentary after-shave in the bathroom.
Standing shirtless, we traded swigs from the bottle
of Jack we'd stolen from the state-owned
liquor store back in Des Moines.
We chain-smoked his dad's Marlboros and talked
about the whole day spread out in front of us.
We wanted to go to speakeasies, meet mobsters,
pick up a prostitute.

The gulls hovered and fell
from our window to Lake Michigan,
ships steamed and burned
in the distance, green water rolled out
patched with sun, the only ocean we ever knew.

There would come a time later
when we would sit drunk on a bench
in the dark and begin to appreciate
the undercurrents, the hidden fish. But first
my father had to come home from the jungle
and Carl had to go, he had to wash his face
and brush his teeth and slick his hair back
three more times. I had to drive into a tree
and crack two ribs and flunk economics
so as mother had predicted from the beginning
I'd be good for nothing but to tell you these stories.

Chad Albert Sellers is a St. Paul, Minnesota-based poet. His work has appeared in The Wolf Head Quarterly.