Fortune Cookies: Poems by Andrew Cox

Around These Parts

Because a car dealer thought giving away a twelve-gauge shotgun with every truck was the perfect sales pitch, a man went home and blasted all the birds on his block. He was the kind of man whose neighbors said he was always so quiet, thoughtful, considerate, once he climbed my tree and saved my half-blind cat. Next door another boy grew up without a dad and a woman tried to be ironic about it all, but felt it was hard sometimes to care. So she married a butcher who left her nonplussed, but she liked her mother-in-law who took the boy under her wing, so to speak. And the boy, the boy went around with a certain look on his face, the look of someone who wanted a pick-up truck but had no money to buy one with, the look that launched a thousand failed attempts. The boy thinks about sticking up the corner gas station but can't even get up from what his mother calls the divan, can't even call the girl who let it be known she was interested, the girl whose father owns the biggest car and truck dealership around these parts.

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