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19 Fisher King They sold my favorite dive to Revco the week my gangrene toes got clipped clean (a logging accident— I sued, lost). No doctor slipped me salve or sundries. Crews trucked and gutted, adding fluorescent lighting, a pharmacy, blood pressure detectors, freezer cases. Stools were sawed to kindling, and they boxed twelve dozen pint glasses by the curb— a damn shame. It’s been some twenty years and counting, but every day is bland as water. I can’t bring myself to try the pricey uptown joints, and most evenings I return to this familiar lot, stand outside and watch the smocked employees locking up. When the store goes black, glares from streetlights reflect me still inside where, decades back, 20 I joined the other loggers after work, slurping a dozen cold lobed oysters with hot-sauce stinging low in my throat while Johnny Carson beamed, all toothy, “That’s outstanding, really fabulous.” Now, approaching longer days, the patrons come at sunset and linger past closing. The spring aisle is tangled with windsocks and women buying windsocks. I’m hungry for one. She’s young and yellow rain-slickered like the Morton Salt girl, and I keep a pearl under my tongue, lozenged there in the grotto of my mouth, a flawless specimen I’ve saved, waiting for the glossed lips ready to receive it and heal me through closeness, make my heavy boots buoyant. This is modern medicine. This is me corkscrewed through parting skies, the naked seraphs crooning, isn’t it fabulous? ...

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