Daddy came home from work
one Wednesday in July at 2 pm
smelling like beer
not talking to anybody
after that he didn't stray too far away
spending most of what would be his last year
in Mam-maw's old tractor shed
playing a Peavey Strat copy
through a beat up matching amp
he'd picked up at Pancho's Pawn & Loan
We could tell when he was on the Yellowstone
amp cranked up to 11
the neighbors up the hill
would raise hell at us on the party-line
to make him stop
August was hot as a malaria fever
and he wrote a whole catalog
of songs that didn't rhyme
with mean-sounding titles like
Burn Up World
'64 Suicide Lincoln and
Murderous Bible
When October rolled around
he took Uncle Junior's car trailer
to the junkyard and returned with ten car fenders
mostly GM products
November afternoons
were spent in Old Milwaukee
with the little Savage bolt-action .22
shooting them full of holes
or pinging in thumb-sized dents
with a 2 lb. ball peen hammer
other times working them over
with pitted leather work boots or gloved fists
In the gray of winter
he set to practicing
the trade he'd learned
at 17 in reformatory
skills acquired as payment
for a well placed
and equally deserved shovel
delivered to the face of his own Daddy
to sober him up
the patched metal fenders
once again smooth as glass
primed and begging to shine
with paint he couldn't afford
St. Patrick's Day
called to the neighbors up the hill
to light out for NOLA
so Daddy liberated some 20 odd gallons
of John Deere green from their shop
and sprayed his fenders with it
suspended from the tractor shed rafters
like ornaments on a brown Christmas Tree
I came home from a party
Sunday morning after he'd finished them
still drunk on malt wine
and saw the light from the shed
a cold north wind
banged the open double doors around
those old fenders bumped each other
like bleached out cow bones
making hollow thumping sounds
scratching away their new coating of stolen love
He was slumped down in a chair facing them
one spent .22 shell on the concrete floor
a blue dot between his eyes
flowing crimson into open coveralls
We never took the fenders down
and on days when I know
the wind is just right
I'll drive out there
open up the doors and play
Daddy's two chord angry songs
through that fuzzy old amp
behind the hollow bony beat
of his memory
RJ Looney has lived all but eight months of his life in Arkansas. His poetry has been published both in print and online, most recently in Pigeonbike: Beyond the Broken Bridge, Salt Zine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Thunder Sandwich.