Penny

D.R. James

The b & w photo, not posed, is the picture of 50’s innocence:
little boy, five, with a butch and sensible shoes, little bow tie,
little vest over crisp white shirt. Sitting ‘Indian’ style, he pets
his little dog, who no kidding lies at his knee looking
adoringly over her shoulder and up into his grinning face.
Behind them and outside the picture-perfect picture window,
the rear end of a two-toned coupe (gray and white in the
photo and, if memory serves, reality), but stock, that is, not
souped-up like it might be ten years later, by then the
famous ’57 Chevy favored by hot-rodders when the boy
would be turning fifteen. Like all photos, this one doesn’t
show it all. Not the half of it. Not most of why it’s made its
way into this confession. It leaves out how the small-bodied
boy finds it easy to overpower the little dog, cower her
with his angry-albeit-little-boy voice, threatening to slap her until
he switches abruptly to cooing just to see the relief spread
from nervous face through trembling body to tail curled
between her legs. It leaves out how his parents will put her
down while he’s away at camp. It leaves out how instead of
‘predicating a tendency toward social pathology’, this history
merely marks an eccentric twisting in the inexplicable path.

—first published in The Ekphrastic Review

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 34 years and lives in the woods outside Saugatuck, Michigan. His poems and prose appear in various journals and anthologies, his latest of seven poetry collections is If god were gentle from Dos Madres Press, his microchapbook All Her Jazz is free and downloadable-for-the-folding at Origami Poems Project, and a new chapbook Surreal Expulsion was released in spring 2019 by The Poetry Box. 

Check out James’s author page.

Edited by Ben Sweatman