Back to the Steel City Lounge by Greg Clary

Today marks two years

since I last sat

on a barstool in a real bar.

No frozen blended drinks.

No drinks with cute names.

I step into the thick, blue, miasma,

where second hand smoke as a carcinogen

is not a topic for discussion.

Sign by the door announces:

“You must be this tall to be served.”

I grab a stool at the corner of

the L-shaped bar where

a dozen regulars, all over 55,

dressed in Steeler caps, Carhartt, and leather,

are talking, laughing, leaning over bottles of Iron City.

“There ain’t nothing sexier on a woman than French nails”

“I hate Daylight Savings Time. Made-up by golfing politicians.”

“Sometimes you just have to try it a few times to know it’s wrong.”

“I was in the 3rd grade before I realized that no one else

            got up at 4:00 and went to school smelling like cow shit.”

“We don’t hate each other like the news wants us to believe,

but some people deserve to be hated.”

A wise writer friend of mine

once told me our lives are our own,

but filled with other people’s stories.

This afternoon, for a little while,

strangers tolerated my interest in theirs.

Finished my beer. Paid my tab. Left a tip.

Walked outside into the cold of

my second socially isolated pandemic winter,

feeling enlivened by the stories I heard and

reassured by Bob Marley on the juke:

   “Don’t worry about a thing

‘Cause every little thing gonna be alright…..”

Greg Clary a retired college professor who was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and now resides in the northwestern Pennsylvania Wilds. 

His photographs have been published in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Watershed Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Dark Horse, Change Seven, Detour Ahead, Bee House Journal, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Trailer Park Quarterly,  Tobeco Literary Journal, and many other publications.

His writing and poems have appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Watershed Journal, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Waccamaw Journal, Rusty Truck, Anti-Heroin Chic, Sterling Clack Clack, and North/South Appalachia: Poetry and Art, Vol 1.