WE PLAY “STAYIN’ ALIVE”

and learn howling and crackle are common to both
the sounds of longing and the sounds of losing – like fire
snaps, like this needle-kissed hiss that warms the quiet
before that Saturday Night Fever bass starts strutting.
He kept that album. She had forgotten.
It was buried for years, among his discarded
Consumer Reports, bifocals, and dog-eared bible,
next to his pillbox, “Sunday” left full. It was lost. But lust
and mourning share a conjuring power – like dueling flames,
like the whirling table on his old beloved,
big, wood-finished Magnavox – both burn off time,
both spin life back. “He won it,” Mom says, “In a bet,
playing golf. No – we couldn’t have bought it
– no – not back then. We couldn’t make it fit
in the Pontiac trunk. He put it on the roof!
Without ropes!” She laughs, “But – O –
we really did love disco then…
He wore tight, plaid, disco pants…”
But now –
two months since Dad died – a warp
in the vinyl stalls the siren violins,
holds their feline dip too long,
forcing, for a moment, the hustle
to limp, breaking the spell. I look at her.
And the stereo, the pills, the wheelchair, the books,
the rolodex cards for plumbers and roofers, the putter,
the scripture, all sink in the whirl – crackle, burn,
blaze away, with hi-hat rage,
with wails that sear. She just stares.
Their untold stories –
their secrets never shared – are flares
and cinders, drunk, dancing in her eyes.

*

Evan Leslie grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and now lives in Houston, Texas with his Husband, Ryan, and his rescue pit bull, Rimbaud (formerly Rambo). Evan is a cellist, arts educator, and the director of the University of Houston’s Community Arts Programs. Evan is the former Artistic Producer at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. His poetry has been recently published in The Pinch and Troublemaker Firestarter, New Verse News, and forthcoming in Vita Poetica.