My Mother Dated Otis Redding by Reginald Shepherd
My mother is laughing in the hallway with her friends
I don’t like much, maybe the numbers runner
who gives me dollars to go see movies
while they fuck, a mattress blocking the doorway
where there’s no door. I know what’s “fuck”, and “dick”,
and “pussy”. They’re “tipsy,” she says, they’re
having
a good time. “Don’t I deserve a good time
now and then?” I’m looking through the telescope
I just got from a catalogue, while they
break out the Tanqueray; I don’t know what
that is. They’re putting on some records, it’s
1970, Nixon’s president; there’s a dock in one song
and I don’t know how to whistle, but I know
what’s a dock, and a bay. There aren’t many stars
because of the streetlights, it’s the Bronx,
and the singer sounds sad, he’s dead. My mother
says, “you know, I went to high school
with him back in Macon,” and everybody says
“I’ll bet,” and she laughs too. I wish I was his
son, I wish they’d all go home. It’s late and I just want
to go to bed, but she just wants to have a good
time. I turn my telescope on the Puerto Rican couple
fighting, kissing in a window across the concrete
courtyard, three parrots escaped from the loading
dock freezing in a trash tree, it’s
November, neighbourhood kids throwing rocks
at each other from bicycles, my mother standing in the
hallway
with a paper cup of Tanqueray, or lying
in the hallway in a pool of her own shit.
