day NINETY FOUR

sunday afternoon in rudy’s bar & grill

christ has risen

but my mind isn’t blown by the idea

and tourists from trumpland

are crowding my streets in easter bonnets and bunny ears

blonde mothers with southern drawls

sending instagram photos of times square

posing for picture with cops

decked out in bullet proof vests

holding machine guns outside the subway station

in the kind of day that could really make you hate america

but here in rudy’s bar & grill the action is sparse

nobody cares that it’s easter or that the mets are on

that it’s ninety degrees in april

and we’re hiding from the heat too soon

there are maybe five of us

holiday throwaways

drinking three dollar pints and two dollar shots

the guy a stool down from my wife

is bragging to the ancient bartender

about his twenty-seven year old girlfriend

like the difference between thirty-four and twenty-seven

is something to be looked at in awe

i tell my wife

if he were fifty years old maybe i’d be impressed

which might be wrong to say

to the only woman in the bar

and i think about how i haven’t been in rudy’s in years

maybe once or twice since the days

when their free hot dogs

counted as a luxurious friday night dinner in the city

and we sat in the bar all night drinking cheap beer

safe from the temp jobs that couldn’t even pay the rent

watching hell’s kitchen get drunker and drunker

men dancing alone to old blues songs

because we didn’t want to go home

to that shithole apartment with the bass upstairs

and the gang members on the next door stoop

i think about how time moves too fast

yet too slow at times

about all of the easters that i wasted on christ as a youth

how i’ve lost my taste for bars and hot dogs

and even twenty seven year old women

how i’ve never had taste for cops and america

how i wish all of the tourists with twangs in times square

would go the hell home

back to the states that hate my city

taking their easter bonnets and bunny ears and the heat

and poor jesus christ on his poor little cross

back down there below the mason/dixon line with them

to rot most pleasantly

in that hot southern heat.                                                           

--John Grochalski