by James Long
Monopoly Nights
Dad’s stockpile of orangey $500s glowed
with night’s
possibility, fortune’s warmth. Friday’s electric
excitement, the dice
dancing like the staticky
pops when the needle dropped
on “Eight Days a Week.” Dad blew
the black dots, believing
he controlled chance, and damned if he didn’t,
sailing past Ventnor and not
paying rent. With him
you learned to play like stakes were real, as if
landing on Boardwalk’s hotel might topple
your own wallet. You learned
nothing lasts
longer than the thrill of maybe
winning. What was
bankruptcy to me but a comfortable bed as a game’s
din pressed the wee hours? Saturday
mornings I’d find him again, with Mom,
dealing the bills, mortgage and electric, our home
in those cellophane windows, black
letters of our address, black trees
on the winter hills.
James Long’s poems have appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, and Kestrel, and are forthcoming in Pirene’s Fountain and I-70 Review. A two-time winner of the West Virginia Writers Inc. Annual Writing Contest, he recently finished his MFA in poetry at Spalding University. Long lives, works and writes in Charleston, West Virginia.