George Such

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This flat piece
of unfinished
mahogany
 holds stories. 
There’s a hole
drilled on one
end, where scratches
cross the grain, which
makes me think it once
hung from a nail on a wall.
Written in red ink on one face,
the words Hue, Vietnam, 10-1-2001,
and on the other side, Lac Thien, the
name of the restaurant where my daughter
 Lyndsay and I sat and watched the owner open
our soda and beer with flair. He placed the bolt-
end of the wood tool over the bottle-cap, so the
bolt’s head hooked under the cap’s edge and the
length of the wood sloped downward.  Then he
gripped the bottle with his left hand and swung
his right arm in a grand circle striking the free end
of the mahogany with his up-swinging hand, send-
ing the spinning tool high above his head as the
bottle-cap chattered across the floor. He caught
the bottle-opener with a swipe on its way down.
I was so thrilled I clapped and asked if I could
see the opener and how it worked (using sign
language, since he was deaf.) After he showed
me, he took out his red pen and wrote on the
wood with a deft hand that was missing the
end of its third finger. His young daughter,
who was waiting on us, stood by the table
watching, and in the pause after his gift,
I took the thin gold hoop from my left
ear and gave it to her.  Her face, then
the whole room, opened and fizzed.

--
George Such is an English Ph.D. student at University of Louisiana in Lafayette, where he has been awarded a University Fellowship. In a previous incarnation he was a chiropractor for twenty-seven years in the state of Washington. His poetry has appeared in Arroyo Literary Review, Blue Earth Review, Cold Mountain Review, Dislocate, and many other literary journals; his non ction has appeared in Phoebe. His collection of poems, Where the Body Lives, was selected as winner of the 2012 Tiger’s Eye Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming.