Thomas Merton Visits Dollar General
I weep with Peter as the cock crows three times. I deny my silence and go for a drive,
ending up at Dollar General. It opens in fifteen minutes. Monks are early to everything.
I check my watch and then read my breviary to pass the time. I am on my third Psalm
when the OPEN sign flashes red. It forces me to wonder if a vacancy is waiting for me
in the life I left years ago, not the drinking and pot smoking and reciting bad poetry in bars,
but the cosmic embrace of two teenagers running off to kiss beneath the waves of honeysuckle.
At the heart of things I love God as much as I love women, but by vow, I cannot have both.
I go inside the store to ponder this difficulty as if the economy is the answer to everything.
Does happiness cost a dollar?
Monks are not saints. I flirt with the girl behind the counter. I wonder what she’d look like
as a sunflower ransoming me from those walls of holy madness, but wisdom drags me
back to the monastery before I can hold her hand. It teaches me to think of nothing. Only then
is monastic life bearable.
Witness
I remember the smell
from dad’s grease monkey uniform,
the black under his nails,
his eyes red like a storybook devil.
He accused mom of sleeping
with the mail man
and hit her with a tire iron.
Blood swam down the wall
like a school of redfish.
Then he came after me,
running so fast down the stairs
that he fell and twisted his ankle.
His pig eyes glazed over
and his nostrils vomited
the sour smell of whisky.
I walked up to him, slowly,
poked his shoulder,
thought about wrapping my arms
around his neck, forgiving him,
but my body was against it.
I stared at his hand,
the hand that taught me
to ride a bike, hugged me
after returning from Afghanistan.
It wasn’t the same hand
and I ran out the den door,
his voice as cold as thunder
trailing like IED shrapnel behind me.
Matthew Hamilton holds a Master of Fine Arts from Fairfield University. His stories and poems have appeared in a variety of national and international journals, including Atticus Review, Noctua Review, Burnt Bridge, Boston Literary Magazine, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Muddy River Poetry Review. His chapbook, The Land of the Four Rivers, published by Cervena Barva Press, was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize and won the 2013 Best Poetry Book from Peace Corps Writers. With his wife he lives in Richmond, VA.