25-cent wing night at kangaroo’s By John Grochalski

 

it was

this australian themed place

in a strip mall

in the northern pittsburgh suburbs

a mixture of a bar and club

and the wings came in a bucket

flaming orange and spicy

with that night’s

$1.50 beer special

and the four of us 

old buddies suddenly grown mature

would sit at table

attacking them

like we’d never had food before

as chicks in miniskirts went by

and we didn’t care

for me, it was freedom

from a bad relationship

twenty-one

and we just fought all of the time

i wasn’t sure if that’s what love was supposed to be

or not

but it didn’t matter there

at that strip mall bar

orange spicy goo

on my cheeks

on my fingers

ravaged bones in a metal bucket

piles of rust-colored napkins

all over the table

empty pints of beer piled all around us

as we told dick jokes

and pumped dollars

into the jukebox

to hear all of the music that made our world

it was the grandest place

that i’d ever been

my summer oasis

away from the bullshit and strife

until…

she turned twenty-one that fall

and i she made me

take her there

specifically there

and everything in that bar 

seemed drab and dead to me that night

tasteless

like beer without foam

but she had the time of her life

got drunk and stuffed on that place’s bounty

and in the car

her face a mess of dried buffalo sauce

her breath a catastrophe

she turned to me and said

now, i can come here with you

and your friends

all of the time

before rolling down her window

and throwing it all up

on the cracked and cold

godforsaken 

parking lot.

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where the garbage can smell like roses if you wish on it hard enough.