Still Ready

By Ryan Stovall

The beer belly bungling around Site Thirty Eight
in the RV park next door

scratches, farts, and drinks, and half a century ago
spent his year in Nam.

He hears through wool, wears bifocals thick as tombstone granite,
fights mumbles, finger tremors,

asks to borrow a ‘wine screw’ to celebrate an anniversary, then
lets me help uncorking

after his arthritis fumbles my Swiss Army Knife
down to the grass below.

But the day Ms. Thirty-Four’s Rott-Pitbull mix
jumps his neighbor’s six year old,

I bang a knee vaulting my porch railing
and catch a bite of hard turf—

by the time I’m vertical and spitting grass and limp-running
to the snarl screaming mess

he’s got one liver-spotted forearm a solid foot
down that damn dog’s throat.

When I and others pull the beast and child apart,
he’s bleeding pretty good—

skin that old is awful thin, you know—
but you’d be pressed

to find his bottle-bottom glasses, or a single sign of the shakes,
and when he says

‘Leave me be, go check that kid, Doc,’ his voice
is clear hard glass.

****

Ryan Stovall is a former adventurer, world traveler, and Green Beret. His poetry and fiction have been published variously and can be found (if one is willing to look), and his first book of poetry is tentatively due out fall of 2022. He and his family live in the mountains of western Maine.