Last Calls by Carmen Eichman
She turns on the television, the radio, or a CD on good days,
to obscure thoughts that hook hard into her memory
as days she held onto her father’s belt loops
while he set trot lines in the clear Georgia creek, a week later
on every hook a fish for supper and neighbor’s freezers.
But now there are other memories, more recent,
that she needs to leave, stay left out of,
but wants to shove herself right back across to explore
those thresholds, like stepping between the barbed wire
fence of that Brodie pasture where the sun warmed,
browned her shoulders, the spice of wild heather
and scent of leather boots abundant in the sultry
Kansas air. But the burn nettles got her every time, pricking
her skin, turning it feverish, painful, like these new memories.
But, she still came back,
always. Knew it was where she belonged.
It was a time when Hank Williams Jr. insisted a country boy could survive,
when Alabama, Bob Seger, AC/DC pulled her to the dance floor
shaking her all night long before those last calls when those memories
had not yet happened and
the nights ended with laughter, and her thinking
they always would.
Carmen Eichman has written three novels, the first published, When The Ugly Comes, has been hailed as an adult version of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Carmen traveled extensively as a military colonel’s daughter and studied for eight years under the impressive auspices of master fiction writer, Leonard Bishop, Dare To Be A Great Writer. Earning her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Literature from Kansas State University. Carmen is an Assistant Professor of English, Virginia. Her blog is: http://bellafairre.blogspot.com
