Chris Costello
Five People I Barely Got to Know
1.
Mom’s friend Henry. He had a low scratching growl of a voice and a face like a spent minefield. Once told me about broken bones, and guns, and court dates. He said he missed his friends in prison and the ones who never made it there. Then he drank himself to death.
2.
Dad’s buddy from high school, who was hospitalized fighting racists. His jaw shattered like a beer bottle, and the painkillers did the rest. He never came back to the park after that.
3.
That kid in my math class, who always came in wearing headphones. He spoke in song lyrics and Coleridge poems. I hear he got mixed up in something bad and moved to Vegas.
4.
The folk singer whose name the DJ never bothered to say. I heard him on a radio somewhere in Pennsylvania. He was singing about dead rabbits. His voice became static against the night.
5.
My aunt Sheila, the one who made me want to be an artist. She made collages out of paint and tissue paper that seemed to leap off the canvas. She found religion and relocated to some commune in the woods. All her paintings are in a storage locker somewhere in Ohio.
Chris Costello is a writer and editor from Central New York. His poems have appeared in Paint Bucket, Rise Up Review, Stone Canoe, Nine Mile Magazine, Consetllations, and elsewhere.
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