.png)
THE BELLWETHER REVIEW
Literary and Arts Journal
Devil-Damned
Shane Allison
When my mother speaks of how my father has hurt her over the years,
She acts as if each time is the first. As if him being a bastard
Is something she never saw in him before.
I’m so unhappy. I try so hard to get along with him, she says,
As she looks past a set of dusty vertical blinds into a front yard of azaleas.
When I dare to utter the word divorce again, she says,
No, I’m going to wait, so I can get his money. Like the rest of us,
She now waits like a buzzard on a power line
To swoop down to fill her belly on my father’s remains.
He gets more than one hundred percent now from the VA,
Tucking money in Family Dollar bags to stash under the seat
Of his truck.
I prefer my father when he’s quiet in the house,
Hiding from his family as if we don’t know he’s devil-damned.
When my mother cries, I wipe her tears with my
I Never Liked You Anyway t-shirt.
She thinks that if I talk to him, he will listen to me,
That maybe by sheer will,
He will turn over a new leaf.
But talking to my father means a baseball bat to the head.
A strike for every tear that has streaked my mother’s face.
I can hear her now, don’t say stuff like that about your daddy.
And there it is.
Flipping on and off like the proverbial light switch.
.jpg)
Author Bio
Shane Allison was bit by the writing bug at the age of fourteen. He spent a majority of his high school life shying away in the library behind desk cubicles writing bad love poems about boys he had crushes on. He has since gone on to publish many chapbooks of poetry—Black Fag, Ceiling of Mirrors, Cock and Balls, I Want to Fuck a Redneck, Remembered Men and Live Nude Guys—as well as four full-length poetry collections: I Remember (Future Tense Books), Slut Machine (Rebel Satori Press), Sweet Sweat (Hysterical Books), and, most recently, I Want to Eat Chinese Food Off Your Ass (Dumpster Fire Press). He has edited twenty-five anthologies of gay erotica and has written two novels, You’re the One I Want and Harm Done (Simon and Schuster Publishing). Allison’s collage work has graced the pages of Shampoo, Unlikely Stories, Pnpplzine.com, Palavar Arts Magazine, The Southeast Review, South Broadway Review, Postscript Magazine, and a plethora of others. Allison is at work on a new novel and is always at work making a collage here and there.