Widows at the Slot Machines
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some in wheelchairs, some on crutches, dim eyes peer at flying sevens, cherries, lemons, bells, some can play only machines with big, clear symbols, others squint at the narratives, WinGreen Stamps! Fight Darth Vader! some are draped in ratty furs, some posh cashmere, beringed, knotty arthritic hands moving so quickly over the buttons, a win! more buttons, levers, what do they think, of their young days and young men, children grown and gone, grandchildren too married, forgetting them, no! that here they are still, bells and crazy lights, smoke, shouts, young muscular slim girls running them drinks, old-fashioneds, cosmopolitans, not just beer and wine, they bask in thick air, the tension, win or lose, win or lose, alive again, the worn head of the cane leaning, glitter and noise, the blood running again in the veins and the bonus dinging win or lose, alive! alive! [End Page 119]
Janet Mccann is a professor of English at Texas A&M University (College Station) and author poems published in such periodicals as Kansas Quarterly, Nimrod, New York Quarterly, Poetry Australia, and Parnassus. She is also author of Emily’s Dress (Pecan Grove Press, 2004) and Wallace Stevens: The Celestial Possible (Twayne, 1996).
