Peppermint Patties, a revision
after Eve Ewing
I’m in the basement, on Rainbow Road, well, off Rainbow Road, floating, but not in line with where the road dropped, where it would be easiest to land, rather, into space a little bit to the right where I know the road turns back and knowing the roads well enough I know it’s about a 1 in 3 shot of landing very much ahead of my brother, even when you know the roads well. I nail it, and wonder if my luck (slash skill) might mean dad will come home early. He is at his buddy’s place, in the cul de sac, milling by the grill with a cheddarwurst in one hand and a cigar in the other (it is guy’s night, the only time he smokes), and another buddy, who is about to stab a stake with very large prongs starts a sentence, Women are so
A woman walks out of the woods into his backyard where he can see her. She wears a long peach summer dress, and is his grandmother, from about forty years ago, but this is magic, so he knows who she is. Women are so sweet. My grandmother used to hold my hand while I went up to the shopkeepers at the general store to ask them where the peppermint patties were. She stayed with me while I smashed the toy trains I had loved into unrecognizable plastic bits just so my mother could see Bruce Springsteen in concert one night with my father, who was a little bit jealous of Bruce, but liked his music anyhow. His monologue continues until all of the other men have cleaned the yard of cans and cigar butts and put the ketchup back in the kitchen cabinet and shirked off to their cars like the moon into its big gloomy shirt.
Andy Powell is a Teaching Artist for DreamYard in the Bronx, has poems out or forthcoming with Winter Tangerine Review, Voicemail Poems, Bad Pony Mag, and elsewhere. Andy is also a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal and is a 2018 fellow to The Poetry Foundation & Crescendo Literary’s Poetry Incubator.