PAYBACK

by Steve DeFrance


I go downstairs.
My neighbor's feeding fish heads
to some local dogs.
I find my car.
The day's hot enough to
glaze pottery in the back seat.
I start the engine & crank up the air
conditioner. It's running hot.
I flip on the radio.
Bombers race toward Baghdad.
People on the street look dazed.
At the corner, a pregnant woman
stops in the center of the busy street
doing a body count of her growing family.
My knuckles grow white on the wheel.
I miss the light.

Hot. No wind.
The car's a jar with a lid.
I roll the windows down.
Try to cool off.
Trees on the street cringe
from the heat. Birds have stopped
flying, instead they huddle
in melting pools of color,
grey, brown and black,
heads bobbing slowly.
Next to me on the car seat,
a half-eaten Chocolate Hershey Bar
has exploded.

All that is plastic is devolving
into petroleum ooze.
Fillings in my teeth are burning,
touching a nerve.
Rounding a corner, the asphalt's
melting--heat ripples rise
as if from an Iraqi mirage.
High Noon in L.A.
Ahead--two sweating men charge
snarling from trucks, it's all about a parking place.
They fight in the street. Bone & flesh collide.
Under a deserted building, a lone dog wails.

I eye the ageing buildings on this
block--dying Victorians--blemished,
battered, broken & bleeding.
Dwellings filled with growing families.
Spilling over stoops, rambling down steps,
scattering into the street, where they spray
each other down with water hoses.
Lupine smiles seem to contradict the menace
glinting from their predatory eyes.

Just as it is too hot for the fat red spiders
who sit in heat shock--watching
the death dance of the web-caught flies.
These predators are not in a hurry.
It is too hot for them to dine on me.
They will dine when the sun's down.
I turn right onto 7th Street.

All in all, it's a day that causes
ordinary men to break cue sticks over bald heads.
A day so sweltering it makes
common thieves too hot & too wet to steal.
On this day--shrieking babies are being
smashed against cement walls,
and regretfully married women are sharpening long knives,
sweating and staring at the soft underbelly
of their husbands' throat.

It's a grand day for getting even,
a day for settling festering scores.
A day for payback
a day designed for vengeance.
A day to use baseball bats in alleys.
A day to swing socks filled with ball bearings.
A day for reprisals by the damned.
It's just that kind of day.

Driving by the Park on 7th Street,
I see hawks hankering for retribution,
sitting in the shade of hemlock trees
considering all possibilities.