We straddle Piggly
Wiggly crates nestled between
freshly sanded rockers.
We palm half-pint Masons,
moisture-slick, in gnarled grips.
We guzzle homemade whiskey
with tokes of two-toned
menthol chasers in the midst
of the midnight hawk.
Our sugarcane-hardened plasma
coursing, our washtub-scrubbed
bones tautly stretching,
our bodies twanging
the electric, deep river
Mississippi blues.
Our minefield pockmarks
Morse-coding, our lost brethren’s
names intimating,
our bodies twanging
the electric, deep river
Mississippi blues.
Our skeletal memories
tug-of-warring, our cranial platoon
futilely strategizing,
our bodies twanging
the electric, deep river
Mississippi blues.
We are a throng of seniors
on a cinder block porch, airbrushed
by Lawrencean strokes.
We shine attention
on the one with the gray crop
circles in his hair.
He hems us
up in a fit of conniption
about a comrade,
drunk off gin and shine,
somersaulting his rocker
off the porch’s edge.
Our downfallen sir
laces garters of curses
around those splinters
like a groom, the rice
raindrops pelting him.
Despite the bull’s-eye
darts thrown by the one who hates
being the center
of attention,
despite the tawdry
snippets we hold of the storyteller,
he jaws on.
Funk
erodes our bank of banter.
With her unbuckled
sandals flapping dust whispers,
with her mud-streaked slip
straps yoking passion
marked shoulders. The friction
of her wedding bands
corkscrewing around
grooved knuckles emits it: a
pungent potpourri
of barnhouse sweat
and afterglow effect.
It Red Sea-parts us
like a belle shrouded
by fans of divining rods.
We, the hung jury,
stroke our jowls
and crotches, hiking up
tattered pant legs.
Some of us are drawn
to her fullness, yearning
to savor her like
sweet potatoes and fat
backs roasting for noon lunch.
Some of us crow
about all women
being underhanded just
like men, quoting their
own double helical lines
of DNA intersected by multiple
affairs.
Some of us,
familiar with whom
she once was, are sickened by
what she has become.
Rhet Effects 
You are so good at painting stories with your words. So good.
Thanks, Julie. I thought it worked better in a poem than in a short story. I love telling stories through poetry.