“A Visitor at Closing Time”
Inside Papyrus, Volume 12
A Visitor at Closing Time
I’m washing the last shot glass when he walks in,
shivering like a Chicago winter just kissed him.
He looks like he attacked his hair with a pocket knife,
a huge clowns mess of soft brown wool
haphazardly hacked to frame his face.
He’s wearing a once-white t-shirt
now stained like a smokers teeth,
every other step revealing his navel
as his thin, ghostly frame
moves toward the far end of the bar
where he collapses, head falling against the countertop.
My annoyance is piqued with this straggler,
ten minutes before close,
but I humor him, my voice cracking like a bullet.
“Can I get you anything?”
The look in his eyes suggests an endless answer,
twin camera lenses boring back into his skull,
gathering and storing information,
but too numb to process it.
The ensuing silence is broken
only when I hear his teeth chatter.
“It’s on me.” I’m sadistically smiling,
setting a shot of cheap whisky beside his pale fingers,
wondering if his holocaust frame
can handle such an unexpected grenade.
His black lacquered nails hold it dainty like a woman
as he dumps it down his bird throat,
head bobbing downward
as if held on by wires
in the hands of a lazy puppeteer.
He manages, “another.”
Irritation has given way to curiosity,
and he takes this one, faster,
continuing to gain momentum
through the next three.
In heat I’d poured another,
but he ignores the beckoning amber,
rising triumphantly, shaking ceased,
all noise now dormant,
and suddenly he’s behind the bar with me
on his knees hugging my waist,
sobbing a muffled “thank you” into my stomach,
expressing gratitude for nursing him back
from whatever heartbreak
had dragged him through my doorway.
He stands and stumbles backward,
catching himself on the bar
sending the neglected shot
down the front of his low-slung pants.
When he turns around I can see liquid
trickling down the rivets of his hips.
Some instinct forces me to run a finger
down the little valley on the left side,
wanting to know what he tastes like.
I offer him my fingers,
he expertly sucks them clean.
We never kiss
but I spend the remaining minutes
pouring shots down his stomach,
feeding him what I can from the cups of my palms,
continuing his rehabilitation from the lonely evening.
We he can’t take anymore he steals the shot glass,
somehow squeezing it into tight pants pocket,
and, without ever looking back at me, leaves
as curiously as he came in,
still semi-sobbing and drowning in himself.
I hesitate, then follow his echo out the door,
the only evidence that anything had taken place,
scouring nearby streets uselessly.
He’s vanished into the darkness,
starving heart disappearing between the lines of twilight,
and I wander home wishing I had asked his name,
so I could have a word to cry
on nights when no one needed me.
(”A Visitor at Closing Time” first appeared in Papyrus, Volume 12, Oklahoma State University Press, 2007)
(out of print)
