BROKE

We squatted beside a Circle K
where the broken bottles burned
like stars in sand. Flies licked
the lip of an empty bottle
of Thunderbird. Our Oldsmobile
dripped its oil rainbow.
The clouds drifted mindlessly
from horizon to horizon.

The store clerk suspicious –
not that you would blame him – as
we uncrumpled what bills we had,
counted out the coins between us,
and measured our extravagance:
two tall cans of Budweiser,
a medium bag of chips, beef jerky.

She rubbed my shoulders rough.
Fingernails dug deep into muscles.
We drank our beer, ate our chips.
I chewed my jerky and watched
the sparrows in their brown frenzy.

I hung tight to her thigh while –
face it – she let me – so damn amazed
she stayed. She really did –
at least for that day, one more day.

Stephen Reilly’s poems appeared in Charon, Albatross, Wraparound South, Main Street Rag, Broad River Review, Cape Rock, Poetry South, and other publications. One of his poems appears in the anthology Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination (edited by Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice O’Sullivan, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Fla. 1995). Reilly recently retired after working 30 years as a staff writer for the Englewood Sun, a daily Florida newspaper with circulation in south Sarasota County, Charlotte and DeSoto counties.