An Exciting Past

I asked him why his picture wasn’t
in the family photo album.
He just laughed, his teeth tobacco-
stained and jagged as a broken
storefront window. “They can find my
goddamn picture on the front wall
at the U.S. Postal Office!
I’m a dangerous man, y’know.”

Grandma kept his old love-letters—
Grandpa’s copperplate handwriting,
script as graceful as the ocean—
tucked into a cardboard folder
in a drawer of her bureau
scented with dried lavender.

Actually he’d been a sales clerk
at a store for stationery
fifty years and then retirement—
but I’ll choose to misremember,
see him scowling from a Wanted
poster next to Jesse James.

--for Poefusion

Collection available! Knocking from Inside