After the Prom by Myles Boisen |
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MY WIFE
by Daniel M. Shapiro is a well-known actor. You know her; she helps make your life better. In E-Z Crimp, she showed you what the world was like full frizz. You should see the letters she gets from people who love the X-Press, people who thank her for agonizing in a creased shirt so they don’t have to. At the grocery store, everyone always asks to see The Face, a deep freeze of anguish, fists entrenched, clawing at lush golden hair. I don’t get to see my wife very often. She works such long, long hours— oh so much to sell!—and usually comes home well after my bedtime. Never able to sleep, she turns on the TV, which becomes a mirror of the frazzled, as she waits all night to find an infomercial for The Insominator, that product for which she longs to be the After, if only just this once. SET A PLACE FOR OSCAR by Daniel M. Shapiro The chalky white Ford drives past the house again and again and again. He didn’t think to look for the birdbath, the signature, what kept this place different from those of old, those that matched one another like Grandpop’s wingtips and felt fedora. He must’ve seen Ed waving frantically through the window on the sixth pass because he made it that time, even though he hadn’t been invited in the first place. But old Oscar always had stories to tell, and stories got paid for with ham and beer. “Hey, Oscar!” Ed shouted at his old friend who used to work with him on jet airplanes. “Oh, I can’t eat,” Oscar said. “I already done et.” But Grandmom’s cooking lures wolves from wherever wolves are at, and soon the old man had his plate covered with the best fats and starches. “I been to Sacramento,” he said in an Arkansan twang. “It’s B’YOO-tiful there. Ev’ry one’s got a lawn there. All you need’s a lawn, a woman with a strong back, and a pack of Chesterfields. You’ll do all right, yeah.” Then that famous smile blossomed, a rowdy collection of teeth picked up on the road from Little Rock to Yuma. Oscar and Ed talked for 12 hours straight, acting like they were filibustering all the bills of the land. Laughs emerged, like old coal cars spinning through the mines, whirring, trying to find some control, never coming back. “Let me get my bypass tomorrow,” Oscar shouted out. “I’m gonna be havin’ fun tonight, you better believe.” In the early morning, the men fell asleep in their chairs, hunched bones blending into the hardest wood. They dreamt of the days when they built engines, the kind that never wore out. Some of them still run. Some of them still burn fuel like you wouldn’t imagine, swallowing hard, as if Grandmom’s cooking their last meal. DAVE GRUSIN INVENTS THE QUINTESSENTIAL 1980S FILM SOUNDTRACK by Daniel M. Shapiro The composer crafts his distinctive template, a slick mix of syncopated jazz piano and flawless drumming, freeze-dried gloss to keep Reagan’s hair in place. It would synchronize perfectly with Dustin Hoffman’s uptight “Tootsie” walk, convince us an unquestionable man could dress up women’s lib. It would whittle Henry Fonda’s monster dad down to darling old poop, toe-tappingly strip lasting impressions from De Niro and Streep. As Iran-Contra hearings spew from his TV, Grusin begins to envision the score for “A Dry White Season,” the anti-apartheid coda, black justice defined by white courage. Turning down the sound, he extracts glorious chords from the keyboard, making Oliver North a patriot.  Daniel M. Shapiro Daniel M. Shapiro is a schoolteacher who lives in Pittsburgh. He is the author of The 44th-Worst Album Ever (NAP), Teeth Underneath (Foothills Publishing), and a forthcoming collection of celebrity prose poems (sunnyoutside press). He is also co-author of Interruptions (Pecan Grove Press), a collection of collaborations with Jessy Randall. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, RHINO, Sentence, and Forklift, Ohio. |
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