By: John Ziegler

The Black Strap

We snitched coins from the Japanese lacquer tray
on father’s dresser,
cigarettes from mother’s pocketbook.

Manners were taught by father.

No elbows on the dinner table.
No singing.
Robert hummed.
No humming.

Don’t talk with your mouth full.
Don’t interrupt.
Don’t hold your fork like a screwdriver.

But Mother was the one who whispered —
Don’t make me get the black strap!

The strap was taken from its hook just once.

Robert had made her tremble with exasperation.

She snatched the strap from its hook
and chased him through the kitchen,
up the front steps
down the back steps
out the back door,
and into the side yard
where he mounted his Schwinn
and was gone.

She collapsed on the porch glider, crying.

I eased the strap from her clenched fingers
and hung it back in the pantry closet,
beside her apron with the Dutch Girl stitched on the front,
then sat beside her until her shoulders became still.

Alice

The widow Abigail Bitting lived for 66 years
in her brown brick house.

She wore her deceased husband’s brogans
and baggy pants scented with bacon grease.
Her side yard was awash with irises and lilies.

Beneath the honeysuckle hummingbirds hovered
among blossoms and vines.

Her white hair framed by a blue bonnet,
she sang soft psalms in German
while she unearthed weeds
and tossed them on the compost pile.

Her tow-headed granddaughter Alice
spent a week with her each summer
and each summer I was drawn across the alley
to the privet hedge for long talks with her
about everything, about nothing.

She lived in Milwaukee, a distant planet.
She played violin and loved math.
We played what is the square root of…

Alice wore dresses
and smelled like sliced apples.

In August her father came
in his station wagon,
a brown and white dog
hanging out the window.

Though I knew she was gone,
I looked for her each time I passed by
while the widow Bitting
knelt among the lilies and irises.

###

John Ziegler, formerly an art teacher, landscaper and gardener, is a poet and painter living in a northern Arizona mountain town.