Penny, by D.R. James

Family photograph from the poet.

Penny

The b & w photo, not posed, is the picture of 50s 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 ’56 Chevy favoured 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.

​D.R. James

This poem was first published in Sheila-Na-Gig 2.4.
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D. R. James has taught writing, literature, and peace-making for 33 years at a small college and lives and writes in the woods east of Saugatuck, Michigan. Poems and prose appear in various journals and anthologies, and his most recent of seven collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press) and the chapbooks Split-Level and Why War (both Finishing Line Press). www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage