Figs

Back then I used to eat figs

I was already gone

Purple fingers

A cat in the window

There was a tree back there

Behind that nightmare

Knotted

Dead figs

Flies and tiny black ants

Back when I used to eat figs

my father drank 

Wrecked the car

and slashed his ear

How they say to not look back

Sure to bring a heart attack

Back when I used to eat figs

I called him Jesus

Begged for semblance

Begged for solutions 

That year Jim died

and St. Helen blew

Gone, the staggering fisherman

Gone, the lake

Handful of spirits

covered in dust

Back when I used to eat figs

my mother cried

So did the neighborhood

Under the smog

Under the gun

How they say the things you lack

Sure to bring a heart attack

Jude

As it turns out I jog by where it happened. When I heard about it on the radio it didn’t hit me that it was that indoor swap meet. The glass building that’s on the corner. I bought a pair of shoes there once. When I was a kid my uncle would take me to a swap meet way out by the mountains. He was always drunk, kept a small bottle in his back pocket. He’d buy tools. Hammers and nails. Once he bought a box of chicks, saying they were going to give him scrambled eggs. I don’t know if they ever did. I loved him. He died when I was a kid.

“If you want to stay the weekend you have to work,” I remember him saying, a trapdoor spider crawling over his thick dirty hand. It was early morning. His face was alive. “Got to pick my worms.”

The radio said he was a local man. Married with a kid. They got the guy that did it. They found the knife. It doesn’t look good for him. It doesn’t look good at all.

They must have got one of those pressure washers to pick up the blood. There’s not a sign of it. You wouldn’t know anything happened if you didn’t know. There’s a little shrine on the side of the building now. I guess he just bought some candles, prayed to one of those saints like my father.

“He was a victim of mistaken identity,” the voice on the radio said.

It also said services will be held this Saturday.