The How Come of My Father’s Gold Tooth with Music by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys

John Bargowski

I hope he was dishing out more than he got
 when some jealous hog-sticker

busted his smile-maker in that packed beer joint
 across from a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Detroit.

My father, one of the boys rolling and tumbling
 over some rouged-up angel cut loose from working
 her daddy’s back forty and hungry for a good time,

the juke box blasting
 “Liza, Pull Down the Shades” and “San Antonio Rose”
 while he whisked her across the worn parquet,

half his paycheck already blown on this big night out
 with the carvers and skinners from second shift,

the slaughterhouse grime worked under his nails
 and gritted into the chapped swirls of the hands
 he shoved back the other Romeos with,

the barkeep yelling to take it out into the back lot
 where any snaggle-pussed lady killer could hear

the grunts and snorts of the penned hogs rising above
 the swinging romp of the Playboy’s “Faded Love.”

John Bargowski is the recipient of a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and his manuscript Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, selected by Paul Mariani to receive the 2011 Bordighera Prize, will be published in fall 2012. He has new work scheduled to appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, Poet Lore, and the Sun.

“The How Come of My Father’s Gold Tooth with Music by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys” appears in our Summer 2012 issue.